Fish Eye Lens

Indian Institute of Managements (IIM) are very important national schools in India for management studies, however, the executives of these school have been partly successful in "gearing" it towards an organization that serves their own ideologies rather than a nation's. Of course, the extent of this "gearing" varies from school to school (there are several schools part of IIM system, e.g. IIM Ahmadabad, Bangalore, etc.) based on their reputation and clout. For example, a new school can not afford to be secretively selective for obvious reasons.

In this article, I will try to present one example to illustrate this "gearing".

AN EXAMPLE:

IIM Ahmadabad (IIM A) calls for GD/PI (Group discussion/Personal Interview) based on following composite score (CS), [see link 1 at the bottom for reference, which is the latest info]:

CS = 3(your percentile - cut-off percentile) + AP

where AP = P1 + P2, where P1 is calculated for class X score and P2 for class XII as follows: P1 = 8 if >= 90% in X, 6 if <90&>=80%, 4 if <80&>=70%, 2 if <70&>=60%, adn 1 for <60%. Same way for P2.

Lets say "your percentile" = 100 (please note that this is the maximum, so this is a worst case analysis)
"cut-off percentile" = 98 (generally IIM A CAT cut-off percentile is very close to 100, in this example I assumed it to be 98, which happens to be their cut-off for CAT-2008, if you have a better number, please feel free to use that).

lets say you had 90% plus in both X and XII, so that gets you an AP=16, and a CS = 22 (that s the maximum possible CS). Chances of "your" getting a call from IIM A is 100%.

Next consider another CAT student, SHE ALSO HAS THE SAME 100 percentile as "yours", but has only 79% in her class X and XII each. So her AP = 8 and CS = 14. Do you see any chance for her? Let us see how much that is: say there are 1000 calls for GD/PI (which is an overestimate, they do not call these many, but this is a worst-case analysis so let it be 1000). That means after calculating CS for all CAT students (roughly around 3,00,000), they will pick top 1000. Now only way for her to have a chance is in top 1000 is that there are less than 1000 CAT appearing guys out of 3,00,000 who have more than 80% score. that is to say, in a class of 300 students only one is getting more than 80% score, where in India, which board, does this happen? Ok, for an example, as per 2009 CBSE result [see link 2 at the bottom for reference], there were about 5% people scoring more than 90%, that is like 15 in a class of 300 (where if remember from few lines back, only one in 300 is called for GD/PI). Thus, her chance of getting a call from IIMA is ZERO. In fact, if Lina even had 89% compare to "yours" 90% she still had ZERO chance, as there will still be 15 guys in  front of her for that 1 spot.

If we calculate further, we will see that anyone who has 90% in both X and XII will have an AP = 16, so even if he or she got nothing in his or her CAT, he or she will still be ahead of her!! Her CS is 14 even though she has 100 percentile in CAT!! So her chances of getting a call will be non-zero only if there is not even a single student in a set of 300 student writing CAT who has more than 90%, likelihood of this is zero as there are already 15 (>95%) in a set of 300 just based on CBSE results and if you safely assume that twice the number of people are there between 90 and 95 (i.e. 45 out of 300 >90%) and say 1 in 50 such extremely high acad student write CAT (i.e. very close to 1 out of 300 > 90% and writing CAT). YOu will say it is still close to1 and not 1 so there is aroom for her, then please do not forget that we have not at all counted student between 80% and 90% , if you count them in, then she has ZERO theoretically estimated possibility of getting a call.

1. http://202.41.76.206/website%20shortlist%20note%202009-11.pdf
2. http://www.cbse.nic.in/statistics/other_statistics_x_2009.doc

END OF EXAMPLE


This was one example how IIM A gears to select people of their "liking" regardless of national objectives. I can do one more example about how IIM Bangalore (IIM B) does the similar gearing, but I think i will let the interested reader, use the link 3 below, to do this excercise (a hint, in IIMA CS, CAT has a weigtage of 6/22=27% and school marks has a wt of 73%, in IIM B, the "CS" has 20% for CAT and 40% for school marks, for details see the link 3)

3. http://hrm.iimb.ernet.in/cat2008/PGP-Admission-Process-2009.pdf



IIM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Management