17 of 1.8 lakh candidates ace CAT 2015, highest in 5 years

MUMBAI: Seventeen of the 1.8 lakh candidates who appeared for the Common Admission Test 2015 bagged the perfect score, the highest in the last five years. The number rose by one though experts, after a reading of the questions, had feared a drop in hundred percentilers. All 17 are engineers, as has been the case for most years.
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From among the 58,270 girls who appeared for the test for admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), only one made it to the elite club of 100 percentilers.If absolute numbers are taken into account, registration by women grew by 13.8% compared to 2014.
For the first time this year, 80 transgenders registered for CAT. About 41 eventually appeared for the test in November, but none managed to score above the 90 percentile, said the results data released on Monday by IIM-Ahmedabad, the CAT 2015 organizer.
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While registrations are always on the higher side from cities such as Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mumbai, Pune ruled the roost this year with the highest number of candidates — 10,359.

The data did not officially reveal the names of the toppers. Of the 17, at least three are students pursuing their final-year engineering degrees from the IITs: Chirag Jha, chemical engineering at IIT-Bombay, Nischay Budhiraja, at IIT-Roorkee, and Sabyasachi Mishra, mechanical engineering at IIT-Kharagpur. Prateek Bajpai, a civil engineer from Indore, V K Giri, an electrical engineer from Bhopal, and Sanuj Mittal, a fourth year BTech student from Delhi, are also among the toppers.
Of the 1,814 students who scored above 99 percentile, 136 are girls. About 9,000 scored above 95 percentile, 1,243 of them girls. Among women, only eight managed to get 99.9 percentile. Ruchi Aggarwal, a commerce graduate from NM College, scored 99.99 percentile from Mumbai.
Several students who managed to score 98 or 99 percentiles have not made the cut with IIMs giving weightage to criteria other than CAT scores. “IIMs are giving decent weightage to academics (over the years), work experience, so many with even 97 percentile are getting interview calls,” said coaching institute mentor Vinayak Kudva.
Some candidates who scored above 98 but failed to get a call from the IIMs as they do not meet the sectional cut-offs. “This year, the data interpretation and logical reasoning section was tough leading to poor scores in that section, though students have performed well in other sections and managed a good score,” said another trainer.