Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) are a brand known all over the world in technology, and Indian Institute of Management (IIMs) have also made their mark in the world in terms of management. The premier institutes of India are known for selecting the best of the best, or the cream of the country as some people call it and make this cream even better. Well I really don’t think I need to write more about IITs and IIMs, as the identity is well established. But the question right now in front of us is the dilemma of Central Government opening 7 more IITs and 7 more IIMs. I will try and present some points around the topic and hope for a nice discussion in the comments. continue

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

In my last post on Compare people – Why?, I discussed the beneficial aspects of comparing people. Readers gave some interesting insights as well in the comments, one of which I quote during the post. In this post I try to discuss the flip side of comparison among people. continue

One fine lazy Sunday afternoon, sometime in the gap between graduation and joining IIM Calcutta, I finally decided to sit down with my copy of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, a book which had come highly recommended from my brother. While the concept of the selfish gene as propounded by Dawkins is all well and good, what really made me sit up and take notice was the concept of the Meme. Not only did it sound a lot like my nickname (Mimmie) but it actually unitized the process of idea transfer. continue

Every year, magazines decide to confer upon a few business schools in India the honour of being the best in the country. But the recognition inevitably comes with the same caveat – we do not hold a candle to the top B-schools of the west. They gratingly harp about the lack of research done at Indian B-schools and the subsequent lack of generation of “intellectual capital”. The authors of such articles seem to miss the raison d’etre of B-schools, which is to create capable managers. continue

Being a web enthusiast, I never thought I would ever write a post saying why something shouldn’t go online.

For starters, CAT is NOT like GMAT. CAT is a relative scoring examination. People gain admission in colleges because they perform relatively better than others in the CAT exam. GMAT scores are always used on a very different plane – you only use them to make an approximate cut off for selection, more like a health score, but nothing more. You would rarely find someone missing out on admission of a college that considers GMAT scores because of having just missed the score. And that’s what CAT is all about. You can actually miss getting a call by as less as 0.01 percentile.
By spacing CAT over 10 days, the very beauty of CAT is being spoilt. It is supposed to be an exam that lakhs of people take at one go, and based on their relative performance, a set of people are selected for interviews. By spacing the exam over 10 days, and choosing different questions from a question bank of 3000, the complete concept of relative scoring is gone. continue

The news of Common Admission Test (CAT) going online was doing the rounds since the past couple of years. This year during the convocation at IIM Calcutta it was announced by the Director Prof. Shekhar Chaudhary. To best explain CAT I quote from Wikipedia

The Common Admission Test (CAT) is an all-India test conducted by the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) as an entrance exam for the management programmes of its seven business schools. About 250,000 students took CAT in 2008 for about 1500 seats in the IIMs. This is said to make the IIMs more selective than the Ivy League Universities. continue