What makes IIM-A the toughest to crack?
Once again, The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) is in news for being the toughest B-School to get into across the world.
Yes, it’s true. Where Harvard’s application to acceptance rate is 13 per cent and Stanford’s is 7 per cent, our own IIM-A admitted only 0.25 per cent of applicants for the class of 2012-2014!
IIM admissions are primarily based on CAT scores. But even if we were to talk of GMAT, as revealed by a recent QS survey, students of IIM-A and IIM-B have the highest GMAT scores worldwide. The average GMAT scores in Harvard and Stanford stand at 730 and 729 respectively, and the score is 770 at IIM-A.
So what makes IIM-A the hardest to crack in the world? According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the competition in vastly-populated India is quite intense. As a result, several candidates have outstanding grades, making it easy for an institute like IIM-A to have the luxury of such high cut-offs. Even the top CAT scorers with 100 percentiles have been unable to secure a seat in the institute, reported the Indian media recently.
The institute is known to be biased towards engineering graduates, favouring candidates with a technical bent of mind. Justifying the institute’s admission process, Ishita Solanki, manager, global partnerships and corporate affairs of IIM-A, says, “It is not the entrance test (CAT) but the aptitude of students that counts. We admit meritorious students. So the scores of entrance tests is just a part of our admission process. We base our decision on personal interview, candidate background and other factors. We too try to select a diverse profile.” However, a look at the past two years’ batch profile shows no difference – engineering grads with high CAT/GMAT scores are still the ones to make it through.
Back in 2002, The Economist had published an article “Which MBA?” wherein the magazine’s intelligence unit found that IIM-A was the toughest business school in the world to get into, with more than 70,000 applicants fighting for 200 places. The Economist’s team had predicted that IIMs could soon take over the internationally sought after institutes (like Harvard, Stanford & Chicago Boothe) with world-class faculty and bargain price fee.
Eleven years after that article was published, IIM-A is still struggling to find a place among its international peers. Lack of students from diverse backgrounds (ridiculously low number of students from humanities and social sciences) and low number of women candidates points to the same story. As Bloomberg Businessweek puts it, “India’s top business school is harder to get into than the most selective U.S. MBA program, but diversity is lacking.”
*Data for batch 2012- 14
