Common Admission Test 2009 will be held in a window of 10 days from Saturday, November 28 to Monday, December 7 2009. According to information available with MBAUniverse.com, the CBT CAT 2009 advertisement containing the details of this year’s admission process will be published on Sunday, August 30, 2009.

The starting and closing of the CAT vouchers sale will be on Monday, August 31, 2009 and October 1, 2009 respectively. The closing date for registering for CBT CAT 2009 will be 11.59 pm on Thursday, October 1, 2009.

As is well known now, the Common Admission Test (CAT) of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) at Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Indore, Kozhikode, Lucknow, and Shillong is going to be a Computer Based Test (CBT) from this year onwards. IIMs have been conducting CAT in paper-&-pencil format for the last 33 years. With growing student aspirations to undertake management education, the number of candidates appearing for CAT has been increasing manifold. While about 95,000 MBA aspirants took CAT in 2003, the number rose to about 250,000 in 2008 indicating a rise of a whopping 163 percent. This has resulted in severe strain on the administrative system of IIMs to conduct CAT in its existing format. CBT is a natural culmination of the modernization CAT has undergone.

In the late 1960s, multiple choice questions (MCQ), an educational testing innovation, was introduced for the first time in the entrance examinations of IIMs. Later, in the late 1970s, entrance tests of different IIMs were merged to form CAT. In the late 1980s, optical machine reading (OMR) of the answer-sheets was introduced.