Hitting a perfect hundred, Ravi Teja Palla from Visakhapatnam is one among the ten across the country to have scored 100 percentile in the Common Admission Test (CAT), the results of which were put up on the website early Wednesday morning.
An alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai (IIT-M) the electrical engineer presently works as an assistant manager at Tata motors in Pune. He had ranked 17th in the IIT-JEE in 2008. “I did not expect the score. There is a round of group discussion and personal interview, so I want to keep myself grounded,” said the student who puts in 12 hours a week for preparation.
Son of P.Rajendra Kumar, an inspector with AP Police at Vizag and homemaker P. Vijaya, he hopes to join IIM-Kolkata. “I would like to choose what fits me best. I have always been interested in Operations Research and since it is a part of management, I opted for CAT after completing IIT,” says Teja, who took a second shot at the examination after scoring 98.34 percentile in his previous attempt.
Teja is one of the eight students from IIT who scored a hundred. Of the top ten, nine are engineers.
The highest score among girls remained 99.99 percentile, with four girls, none from the state and all pursuing their graduation in engineering, making it to the club.
Andhra Pradesh ranked fourth in the number of students who scored 99 percentile and above in the exam with 105 students from the state, next only to Maharashtra, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.
Of the 1.91 lakh candidates who appeared for the examination, the state accounts for a participation of 17,626 candidates, convenor of examination Professor S.S.S Kumar of IIM-Kozhikode said. A large number of candidates have scored above 99 percentile this year - 255 girls and 1,640 boys.
The examination was conducted by IIM-Kozhikode this year. The computer-based test was conducted over a window of 21 days between October 11 and November 6, 2012 across 36 cities.