education

Updated: Jan 11, 2017 09:59 IST

Simarpreet Singh has shown that physical discomfort is no barrier to achievement as he topped the common admission test (CAT) for business schools with a score of 99.97 percentile. The 22-year-old is paralysed waist down after an accident in August 2015.

Simarpreet, now working with a private firm in Gurugram, went to St John’s High School in Chandigarh and then to Doon School before earning his engineering degree from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani.

Percentile denotes how many candidates have been ranked below the student in question. This means that Simarpreet was ranked in the top .04% of 1.8 lakh students who sat for the exam.

Simarpreet’s father Pushpinder Singh, said, “My son had met with an accident in August 2015 while coming to Chandigarh, wherein his spinal cord was damaged and he got paralysed below his waist. Since then, he has been on a wheel-chair. Despite all odds, he has scored the highest without taking any sort of coaching.”

Simarpreet said, “I have received calls from Bengaluru and Ahmedabad and I will want to go to Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. I want to be the best in my field.”

Another engineer, working with a private company in Gurugram, Piyush Mittal, of SAS Nagar, has scored 99.96 percentile.

Top guns

Men continue to rule the roost with seven of them securing above 99 percentile. There is also a woman in the top three.

Others from the tricity who are in the top 1% rank (in the 99 percentile) are Anchit Singla (99.34), Rishav Sharma (99.7), Arnav Bansal (99.15) and Saransh Saxena (99.87). Pritika Sachdeva of University Institute of Engineering and Technology (UIET) is reported to be the topper among women (99.62).

“After graduating from PEC in 2015, I got a job in Gurugram. I had also taken the exam in 2015 as well, but my score then was 98.96. I realised that there were two-three areas, where I was lagging behind,” said Mittal.

Another top gun from Chandigarh, Pranshu Batra, who has secured 99.48 percentile, said, “I am in the final year of my engineering at University institute of engineering and technology (UIET) of Panjab University. I studied after my university hours. I’ll wait for the short listing, after which I’d like to take admission in IIM Lucknow.”

The CAT entrance exam is not only the gateway for entry into 19 IIMs, but also in other colleges in the country that accept the CAT scores. The University Business School (UBS) of Panjab University is one of the prominent colleges to accept CAT score and its cutoff is 90 percentile.