To get admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Management, one must have the best score in the Common Admission Test. While this must be true for most IIMs in the country, the Indian Institute of Ahmedabad looks beyond CAT scores while shortlisting candidates for admission. Last year, the city-based management institute had called a Haryana student with 89.67 percentile for second round of admission.
Continuing with the trend, this year the institute has sent call letters to 182 students who have scored 90 percentile or less in CAT, said an IIMA official. The premier B-School’s drive to promote diversity in its classes is behind this decision, say officials. Interestingly, candidates in general category who scored 81.53 percentile in CAT-2017 have been called for the second round of interview.
The lowest percentile rank for OBC category is 75.53 percentile, for schedule caste it is 70.78 percentile, 60.84 percentile for scheduled tribe and 70.81 percentile for differently abled candidates who have cleared CAT 2017. Reason for issuing call letters to students with CAT score considered low for other IIMs is that IIMA invites top scoring candidates from varied courses -be it journalism, business administration, arts and humanities, design course, LLB or BTech- BE to mention few.
IIMA has made a list of more than 50 such courses and toppers as per the merit score - which includes CAT score apart from past academic records -- get to appear in the second round of admission scheduled to start from January end. Officials at IIMA said this is an effort to provide an opportunity to students to prove their mettle and be part of IIMA’s PGP and PGP-FABM courses – both two years course — which will have about 400 students.
Chairperson of admissions at IIMA for 2018-20 batch said, “IIM Ahmedabad calls candidates based on multiple parameters, CAT percentile is one of those parameters. These details can be found on the admission website.” He further said, “At IIMA, we believe that diversity in a management classroom is a must, and hence, our admission policy reflects that.
We have announced CAT percentile cut-offs for different academic and reservation categories, and those can be accessed from our website,” Hitesh Devalia, Director of a CAT tutorial in the city, said that IIMA issues letter to many who scored below 90 percentile. “It is not the case for all IIMs. While other IIMs focus on CAT score, IIMA has a characteristic in which they cherry pick students from variety of course.
They choose top performing 50 students from each course to appear for second round of admission. So, application or participation in CAT from specific course is less, the student will automatically be shortlisted if they have good academic track-record,” he said. IIMA on Monday evening issued call letters to 1200 students for the second round of admission to PGP course. Officials at IIMA said they were yet compiling data of FABM course. The second round of admission consists of academic writing test and personal interview.
