A total of 2,04,267 candidates have registered to appear for CAT 2010 against a total voucher sale of 2.06 lakhs, the Convenor of the Common Admissions Test (CAT) 2010 and IIM Lucknow Professor Himanshu Rai told PaGaLGuY today.

According to the data shared by Prof Rai, there is a marginal increase of 1.65 percentage points in the number of freshers taking this year's CAT. While in CAT 2009 the number of candidates with less than 6 months of work experience was 71%, this year the number has increased to 72.65%.

"Since the economy is improving, there would be a tendency to hold on to jobs one already has," Prof Rai said, reasoning the drop in the number of candidates with work experience.

But the most interesting change in the CAT 2010 registrant profile is the fat 4.6 percentage points drop in the number of engineers. In CAT 2009, the number of registrants with engineering+technology+architecture education were 65%, which has come down to 60.39% for CAT 2010.

There is similarly a decrease in the number of arts and science graduates taking CAT 2010. Candidates with arts/humanities education reduced from 3% last year to 2% this year, while those studying science decreased from 7% in CAT 2009 to 4.89% in CAT 2010. The proportion of commerce and BBA graduates increase by 2 percentage points from 23% to 25% from CAT 2009 to CAT 2010.

Apart from commerce and BBA graduates, the gap left open by reduced number of engineering, arts and science graduates was filled up by increased number of graduates of a myriad variety of courses such as animal husbandry, medicine, dentistry, agriculture, law and others.

The number of General category candidates have dropped by 1 percentage point to 81% compared to CAT 2009. The non-creamy OBC category candidates form 11%, while SC category forms 6 percent and ST category 2 percent of the total registrants.

Of the candidates, 74% are male while 26% are female, which is very similar to the previous year's trend. As much as 60.13% of the candidates have an engineering education.

At 21.48%, more than one-fifth of the candidates will apear for the CAT from the National Capital Region alone. Combining the New Delhi, Noida, Greater Noida, Ghaziabad, Faridabad and Gurgaon towns, the NCR region is the single largest testing zone in this year's CAT 2010.

Mumbai is a distant second with a representation of 9.52% of the total number of candidates while Bangalore comes third at 9.22%.

In terms of the permanent addresses of the candidates provided at the time of registration, the maximum number of candidates belong to Maharashtra (14.83%) followed by Uttar Pradesh (13.15%) and Delhi (9.76%). Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh follow next at 6.61% and 7.27% respectively.

The total number of registrations in CAT 2009 were 2,41,582, which have dropped by 15.4% to 2,04,267 for CAT 2010.