CAT - the old story of 2006

Whither management?

Every year thousands of MBA aspirants pour their hearts out (and their parents’ money too, in coaching classes) to get into the few coveted Indian B-schools. Every year, many B-schools – and that includes the most respected ones – play a trick or too and keep the aspirants guessing as regards the selection criteria.

Take the case of – who else – the IIMs. CAT (Common Admission Test) is the first hurdle that over 150,000 students this year have to clear before getting into the IIMs. The IIMs shortlist aspirants on the basis of their CAT scores, which they were expected to post on their respective websites on 1st Jan 2006. For the CAT conducted on November 20, 2005, at least one IIM was showing the status of the old CAT notification on its website! Nice try, but that’s hardly management.

It is as disheartening as disturbing to see that almost all coaching institutes – the ones that prepare you for CAT – offer more information on IIMs than the IIMs themselves. If you browse through the IIM websites, it might not always be easy to find a link to the results, but if you visit a websites of some coaching institute the link’s right there staring in your face. For an event like CAT result that over 1.5lac students wait with bated breath, why can’t the IIMs themselves make it easier? Highbrows or ivory towers? Not management, surely.

Even some of the most elementary information is something you can’t get out of either IIM websites or their brochures: data of fees, number of seats etc. are conspicuously absent in both sources. Solution: approach a coaching institute. Have the IIMs started outsourcing that too?

Over the past years, there have been coaching institutes that claim – and apparently they are correct too – that a couple of questions in the CAT are inconsistent or are incorrect. Are the IIMs listening? Doesn’t a test written by over 1.5lac deserve good proof readers?

Even if you write the CAT, you’ll never know your actual marks. What you get – and that too started as late as 2002 – is a scorecard that is enigmatically simple and complex at the same time. It tells you your ‘percentile’ – how you have done vis-à-vis others – and a score called ‘percentage’ which is actually your score compared to the toppers’. After going through this maze, you are still wondering what your actual scores are.

The worst part – or the best, depending on which side of the IIMs you are – is the IIMS will never let you have any statistics as regards the scores of those who those ‘gifted’ ones, the ones finally selected. What the IIMs will probably choose to call their prerogative of confidentiality translates to downright neglect of the basic right of applicants in a democratic country: a student has a right to know by how much he missed the target. It’s much like – well, forget it.

But the IIMs will continue basking in their glory of management – much of which is created by their tendency to guard all the CAT scores and selection criteria like they are guarding the heavy water plant. Good job IIMs, but you are in the wrong profession – with a fiercely secretive spirit like this, you deserve to be the information ministry of a communist country. By the way, did somebody say the IIMs teach subjects that cover corporate governance, business ethics, transparency, right to information, glasnost, and the like? I wonder what that means.