The Common Admission Test for the Indian Institutes of Management has been rescheduled and is expected to be held in February 2004. Officials will be announcing the exact date and other details on Wednesday November 26.

Students appearing for the re-examination would not be charged any extra money.

The exact date will be decided on Wednesday after consultation with the directors of the six IIMs, Dr Bakul Dholakia, director of IIM, Ahmedabad said after a meeting of the CAT Group comprising chairmen of the admission committees of the six IIMs. He refused to divulge the details of the meeting but said the new session of the IIMs would begin in June as per schedule.

The CAT Group comprises Prof Vijay Srichand (IIM-Ahmedabad), Prof Sukhdevan (IIM-Lucknow), Prof Dinesh Kumar (IIM-Kolkata), Prof Ishwar Murthy (IIM-Bangalore), Prof Pranav Pani (IIM-Indore) and a representative from IIM-Kozhikode.

The CAT had been cancelled following leakage of the question papers. The CBI, which is probing the incident, has absolved the IIM management of any complicity.

Regarding the CBI probe into the paper leak, Prof Dholakia said, "The agency has not only given a clean chit to all the IIMs but also confirmed that none of the locks of the trunk in which the questions papers were delivered from the printing press were tampered with, thus strongly indicating that the paper was leaked before they had been sealed the trunks."