Hi People,
Found a nice article about the fallacies of B-School Ratings by J.A.M. I think it's a bit old, but pretty nice read. Check it out here:
http://www.jammag.com/Careers/bschool/bst.htm
Business Today in its true pretentious Punju style unveiled what they thought was the ultimate study in details. Pity they forgot to add the page that mentions what the hell they were thinking when they came up with results. A parameter called “Perception” forms 30% of the Total Score on which institutes were ranked! A sampling of what they believe in:
* The Faculty of the IIMs hate their Institute and have been working there only because of the phataka secretaries, because none of them get a decent score in the Faculty Perception Index. This index is topped by TAPMI-Manipal!
* Alumni of the IIMs hate their campus even more hence they feature nowhere on the Alumni Perception Index either. MDI-Gurgaon tops this index with a perfect score of 40, followed by IRMA, BIM, IMI Delhi and even Loyola Institute of Business Admn Chennai in the top 10! So does one assume that 100% of MDI’s alumni are brain-washed enough to not know the existence of any other Institute, and the others have not been completely successful in their mind-control experiments. RANK
1998 RANK
2000
SCHOOL
2 1 IIM (Bangalore)
1 2 IIM (Ahmedabad)
3 3 IIM (Calcutta)
5 4 IIM (Lucknow)
N.E. 5 IRMA (Anand)
4 6 XLRI (Jamshedpur)
8 7 MDI (Gurgaon)
N.E. 8 IIM (Indore)
9 9 S.P.Jain (Mumbai)
N.E. 10 IIFT (Delhi)
10 11 NMIMS (Mumbai)
19 12 IMI (New Delhi)
33 13 Fore School (New Delhi)
11 14 IMT (Ghaziabad)
7 15 JBIMS (Mumbai)
13 16 XIM (Bhubaneshwar)
15 17 TAPMI (Manipal)
N.E. 18 Xavier Institute of Management & Entrepreneurship (Bangalore)
6 19 FMS (Delhi)
N.E. 20 Loyala Institute of Business Administration (Chennai)
* And these dastardly IIM-walas kidnapped the recruiting companies and held them hostage for seven-figure salaries. ‘Cause they are rated nowhere near the best in Recruiter Perception Index. Except for IIM Bangalore, no IIMs feature on this list but IRMA is no 2, NMIMS is no 3. Nirma Institute and Fore School students appear in the top 10... they have been admitted to local hospitals in shock!
* The abstract commodity called “Recruiter Perception Score” in BT’s own words reflects not just the “quality of output from the school but also their experience of recruiting from the school”. What does this tell us?? Dozens of companies went home empty handed from the top schools after Day 2 or 3. So perhaps our interviewers with mental spectacles of power of +20.0 on each eye only met the disgruntled recruiters? No- it gets better.
A Fundamental Flaw
* A Note on Methodology used for the BT survey mentions this important point which most of us seem to have missed so far: “The schools were made responsible for ensuring Perception data responses from the stakeholders - recruiters, students, faculty and alumni”. Is that weird or what??? This data was NOT gathered independently by BT itself!!!
They do clarify that only responses received directly from the stakeholders and not through the institute were considered. But that still leaves many questions.
Doesn’t this make the survey a barometer of an institute’s Pester Power? The more faculty/ alumni a particular institute could goad to respond, the better its chances at a higher ranking. The lesser known an institute, the more likely its “stakeholders” would take the trouble to fill out a huge questionnaire and submit it under a deadline.
For example, how could an Institute go from Rank-12 to Rank-56? Simple. University Business School, Chandigarh did not provide data on the “Perception Score” so they got a 0. That’s like leaving out 30 marks in a 100 mark paper!
Seen in this new light the survey results make perfect sense. The number of Institutes with incredible jumps in ranking of more than 10 points, in just 2 years, can now be explained.
The top schools were “spiked” - coz the folks from the lesser known instis were not at all objective in their assessments. They saw this as a chance to elevate their own ranking instead of reflecting true and commonly held opinions.Correct me if I’m right... but the onus to gather data from a representative cross-section of alumni/ faculty/ recruiters has to be on BT. This is really taking the easy but questionable way out! (Note: A look at the BI methodology shows that they did rely on mailed surveys but also did their own fieldwork)
* Further - How in heaven’s name can you measure ‘Perception’? That’s like measuring how much you like someone? And ever tried giving that a score? “Well honey, my Love Perception Index of you was about 5.67 last year, but then has fallen to 3.23 this year and so we should break up!... by the way, is your sister seeing anyone? Cause she scored 6.34 on my scale thanks to her new hot-pants!”
I could go on and on and on, picking holes in the various other criteria used, but I am running out of space. Besides I guess I have already made my point, these surveys are basically noble in intention but poor in conception and even worse when it comes to execution. At the very least a survey which starts churning out very unexpected results deserves more thorough investigation. And definitely an explanation?!
Linear Mode
