100-percentile CAT club: 11 engineers, all male

MUMBAI: Eleven of the two lakh candidates who took CAT 2018 for entry to premier IIMs have made it to the blue-chip 100 percentile club. All of them are male engineers, unlike last year when two girls and three non-engineers bagged the perfect score.
In probably a first, this time, one of the four transgender exam takers received a call from IIM Calcutta; IIM Kozhikode has shortlisted two transgender candidates too.

Maharashtra holds the distinction of having the most toppers with seven of them scoring 100 percentile. Among the others, two are from Jadavpur University in West Bengal and the other two from Karnataka and Bihar. This year also had the largest count of girls who took the CAT but none of them made it to the top club.

Three of the seven toppers from Mumai are coaching class faculty, including Patrick D’Souza and Suneet Khumbat, all of whom took the CAT to understand its altering pattern. Amit Bikram, Jagesh Golwala, Rounak Mazumdar and Ritesh Manchanda are among the others who aced the CAT from the state. One person in the top 11 is a final-year student from IIT-Bombay—Jagesh Golwala. Rounak Mazumdar, an IIT Kanpur alumnus and a Thane resident, also cracked the exam.

Another 21 of them, all males, scored 99.99 percentile; 19 of them are engineers. Each IIM will release its list of shortlisted candidates for the flagship post-graduate programme (PGP) 2019-21 batch.

A host of other students from the premier Powai institute and other engineering institutes such as VJTI and ICT have scored above 99 percentile this year. “As expected, the scaled scores are down 10-12%. A score of 174 fetched a 99 percentile in CAT 2017 compared with 155 this year. Similar trends are noticed for 98.95 and 90 percentile benchmarks. The Quant section, which was difficult, is largely responsible for the fall in scores,” said Hemang Panchmatia, chief mentor of a coaching institute.

Patrick D’Souza (42) got a 100 percentile for the fifth time this year; he’s also bagged a new high with his hat trick this year. D’Souza scored 100 percentile in 2016 and 2017 too. “It is very important to stay abreast of current trends in paper patterns and questions. It is a different experience for me every year,” said D’Souza, a Thane resident.

Ever since additional marks were introduced for women and non-engineers in 2010 by IIMs, the class profile has changed, increasing the diversity. IIM Calcutta released a list of 1990 candidates, of which 43% are females and one is transgender.

“I think women have done well. The IIM Calcutta shortlist is an indicator of the fact that a large percentage of women have done well in the CAT,” said Sumanta Basu, convenor, CAT 2018. IIM Kozhikode has shortlisted 17,002 candidates, of whom 3,338 or 20% are females. “The performance of women and non-engineers has been consistent with last year. But many more female candidates took the CAT this year and the shortlisted data will reflect their larger numbers too,” said Debashis Chatterjee, IIM Kozhikode director.

This institute will admit a supernumerary batch of 60 girls for the post-graduate programme. “Apart from the basic threshold of the CAT score, the admission lens will look at the broader aspect of who will make that critical difference to the country and world at large,” added Chatterjee.