What if you couldn’t bell the CAT?

Whether it is CAT or UPSC or any other fiendishly competitive examination, it is great if you crack it and surge ahead in your career, but what if you are not able to? What if you hail from a suburb in Mumbai and moved to Mumbai to get coached and spent a ton of cash, not to mention the investment of faith, time, and money on it? What if your family got into debt as you made continual attempts? What about the ensuing despair? What of the choking stress that comes with it all?

Where are these people? What happens to them? What happens to their ambitions? What happens to their ideology? What happens to their faith? What happens to their self-respect?

Yes, I was one of them. Until I attempted the CAT exam, I believed I was fairly intelligent and could  English my way through the exam. Then, I was put to the real conditions. And it struck me how my gradflation created delusions about my abilities. However, I persisted with taking the test year after year, believing in the philosophy of continuous improvement.

Meanwhile, the CAT exam was getting more and more grueling, competitive, and challenging. The exam, in a landmark move, silently but surely became lopsided towards engineers, meaning one cannot English their way through the exam anymore. One has to ace the math, logic, and data set questions, and do that not in the current academic year, but during their +2 or under-graduation. It was changing its intent and content every year, and those taking the exam were all focused and betting on only the big game – the IIMs. (And as can be expected, those who think IIMs or nothing usually end up with nothing.) Add to it the raging hormones of these twentysomethings, and we have a soup called ‘disaster’ brewing furiously.

Let’s first see the reasons why we choose these exams in the first place:

1. You want to undo your lack of commitment to education in your college or prior. 
2. There is a surge of ambition once you complete your graduation.
3. Your self-awareness is at its most pathetic levels
4. You are naive enough, ambitious enough, or delusional enough.
5. “Baap ka naam roshan karan hai”, is the prevailing sentiment around careers in India.
6. You have no idea about the exam and rely on what coaching institutes promise – yes, they tell you what you want to hear.
7. You need to assert your independence to your family and society.
8. You have a high-maintenance relationship that will only thrive on high ambitions.

Having enumerated these, there is a small percentage of people who can slog the exams out year after year and crack them in the end. And everyone somehow vies to be a part of this small percentage of people who are just at the right place at the right time.

But what if you are a piece of the pie that just tried half-heartedly, or tried with despair, or tried hanging on to hope? Is it the end of the world? What is needed in your case is a strong dose of emotional management along with avenues to improve your intellect. No matter what they say, jobs do help you do both. But before you get the job, you got to account for the five-year gap in your career. What were you doing for five long years post-graduation? More importantly, what were you thinking?

While I believe that each applicant’s journey is different, I do believe that attempting the exam needs rigorous study, so an improvement of intellect is something that will happen anyway.

 “Test-taking strategies” are a common refrain used in the coaching centres for these exams. They dramatize the situation – ‘you need to be a bit of a war general who does a recce and strategizes ways to ace the exam’.  How on earth can you turn into a war general overnight? This is the worst joke I have heard. 

The other thing is emotional management – one needs to develop the mental sangfroid to attempt the test for two hours with a calm and clear mind. The one thing that coaching centres do right is conduct a battery of mock exams that prime you for the real deal. They benchmark you against the best; after all, it is the same set you will be competing against in the actual test.

So, here is a list of things that you are left with because of your experience:

1. You are hyper-realistic in your attitude towards life
2. You learn all that failure teaches you – patience, humility, intelligence, self-awareness
3. You definitely carry improved intellectual capabilities
4. You identify new areas of talent in yourself
5. You become well-read, so your mind is not siloed anymore
6. You become a more well-rounded person as you get a grip
7. The series of fiascos could make or break you

The only problem is that you would know all these things as you connect the dots in retrospect. Right after the fiasco, you are more likely saddled with a strange concoction of bitterness, low confidence, despair, and probably, a little rage. And this takes ages to recover from.

My plea is to the industry out there: Here are some really well-read, well-rounded, self-aware, talented people who need to be invested in. They just need you to say that you will accept the CAT/UPSC scores as a filtering criterion. When GMAT scores and GRE scores are accepted in interviews, I wonder why Indian companies are not considering our desi versions of intellect that can be sculpted to create great professionals. This is a huge HR challenge waiting to be capitalized on.

What happens instead is that these talented individuals start their careers from the ground up when they fail these tests. They clearly perceive they are over-qualified for the jobs. They may carry their bitterness, despair, and rage into their roles which don’t reward them adequately. Some people may be financing their debts, and take up jobs without their passion or involvement in them. In other words, it seems like a thankless life. Is this how we reward the youngsters who bet their time, money, and faith on something competitive?

Had they taken to entrepreneurship instead of focusing on cracking these tests, would you be kinder to them? Society mouths that it is not the end of the world for the disillusioned soldiers, but what if it is? How do we rescue these dark knights? How do we create an environment that not just encourages applications but also scores them should things not come to pass?

Have you, as HR officers, thought about this untapped potential? What are your thoughts? Please share them in the comments below. 

Thanks for reading!