PaGaLGuY.com in the Media

[guitar_killer]

Originally Posted by uRmad

Aah, this isn't exactly a media mention...We got mentioned as media and the article on Great Lakes posted on a page at Stern, NYU

http://w4.stern.nyu.edu/news/news.cfm?doc_id=4884

Cheers

]

gr8 indeed

[supervish]

Just noticed .... the top makes it look like u got 99.9 tile and cracked BCLKI

Wont be joining me eh ?

Edit : was talking abt the one with the accha baccha pose

[Wayne]

Well this is a first of sorts

Chk out this article which appeared in Dainik Bhaskar-Indore Edition

Cheers,

Wayne

[estranged_gnrs]

Originally Posted by Wayne

Well this is a first of sorts

Chk out this article which appeared in Dainik Bhaskar-Indore Edition

Cheers,

Wayne

LM ,
I hope you are ready to receive the monsieur with "escorts" in IIMI...

And hey ,wats this "Peg No 19th " at the bottom of the pic? 19 peg to maine bhi aaj tak nahi peeye!!! PG going to break that record there?

Rohit

[anuragxp]

Originally Posted by Wayne

Well this is a first of sorts

Chk out this article which appeared in Dainik Bhaskar-Indore Edition

Cheers,

Wayne

Bahut Bahut Badhai PG bhai, waise which site is "PagalGuyz" as mentioned in the article? Looks like we need to give this reporter a sample of our insanity

[Jugnoo]

Originally Posted by anuragxp

Bahut Bahut Badhai PG bhai, waise which site is "PagalGuyz" as mentioned in the article? Looks like we need to give this reporter a sample of our insanity

How would you write PagalGuy in Hindi?
it will be "Mad Cow" (needless to say , its one of my IDs )

-Krishna

[pagalguy]

Originally Posted by Wayne

Well this is a first of sorts

Chk out this article which appeared in Dainik Bhaskar-Indore Edition

Cheers,

Wayne

Wayne! Thanks so for much that piece of work.. haven't laughed this much in a long time! pagal gayaj .. yes..I am sure its the name .. lol

[uRmad]

Jai ho....Vernacular media and Dainik Bhaskar of all ....

[pagalguy]

http://www.dailypioneer.com/displayit1.asp?pathit=/sundaypioneer/foray/fory2.txt

The link would change next week I guess .. ...so here is the text



-- x --

Why CAT has got their tongue
.

Mumbai-based 25-year-old entrepreneur Allwin Agnel, founder of two successful dotcom startups neutral web.com and pagalguy.com, had a private amusement party when he was invited to deliver a talk on entrepreneurship to MBA students at IIM-Indore in November 2005.

Barely a year ago, he had dreamt of making it to the IIMs and had slogged for months to prepare for the Common Admission Test (CAT). But he was not accepted in any of the six premier institutes. That, incidentally, was his third attempt at CAT.

As he spoke about the nitty-gritties of starting his own business at an Institute that had found him unfit for admission thrice, it thought how ironical it was. Moreso, in the backdrop of the fact that a global-top-five b-school like Wharton School of Business, Pennsylvania, had granted him admission into its MBA programme. In 2005, the Said Business School, Oxford University, too granted him admission which he chose to forego.

Agnel neither had a strong business family backing, nor any exceptional academic scores to boast of from school and college.

Besides founding two companies, he single-handedly mobilised over a thousand youths across Mumbai, New Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore to step out of their homes for two hours every Sunday and teach street-children. He had pulled this off using nothing but an internet bulletin board.

When he decided to leverage his business and leadership achievements to gain admission into an MBA programme, Wharton and Oxford granted him an interview. The IIMs, however, chose to put the CAT, the world's toughest entrance examination as a rider.

Allwin's story is by no means novel. Each of the 10,000-odd students who are given admission into MBA programmes of the Global Top 50 business schools of the world - including Stanford, Harvard, Tuck, Darden, Fuqua, INSEAD, Chicago School of Business - have a past record of exceptional leadership skills behind them. There are all kinds - lawyers, doctors, artists, bankers, bureaucrats and engineers - among admitted students. Engineers form a minority.

Students from India who are admitted into these b-schools, too, have exceptional finance, liberal arts profiles and work experiences in medium-level leadership roles in retail, corporate or investment banking or in the social sector. The other thing they have in common is that sometime in the past, they failed to crack the super-difficult CAT.

In comparison, what kind of students are the IIMs taking in? The Class of 2007 at IIM-Ahmedabad has 43 per cent students without any work experience. Freshers at IIM-Bangalore's batch of 2006 constitute a high 61 per cent. There are 73 per cent engineers in IIM-Ahmedabad's 2007 batch and arts degree holders are non-existent. The trend is even more amplified in IIM-Bangalore's 2007 batch. A whopping 91 per cent are engineers, though 2 per cent are arts degree holders. The rest have a commerce and science background at undergraduate level. The same pie chart replicates across the IIMs.

An IIM-Ahmedabad passout working with Deutsche Bank says, "Half of my class consisted of Indian Institute of Technology engineers because these guys find cracking CAT very easy. The remaining were from other engineering colleges and others were your usual BCom and BSc people."

Worldwide, the trend in most business schools is shifting against admitting freshers. Be it Tuck, INSEAD, Stanford, Tepper, Sloan, Kellogg or the National University of Singapore closer home, entire batches comprise only of experienced people. The batch profiles are eclectic. In fact, these b-schools run after students with the most unlikely backgrounds. Stanford admitted 47 per cent liberal arts profiles and 35 per cent engineers for its Class of 2007. At Darden, there were equal number humanities, commerce, economics and engineering profiles.

Why is batch diversity important? According to Dr Bala V Balachandran, distinguished Professor of Accounting at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Chicago, "You learn more from your classmates in an MBA course than from professors. You look at a class where you have a uniform number of lawyers, artists, musicians, engineers, bankers, Wall Street brokers and former bureaucrats from 20 countries of the world. All have done wonderful and exceptional things before joining MBA. You spend a day with each and listen to their thoughts and approach about one management problem. You take it a level further and, say, you become good friends with 10 of them. Do you see the kind of amazing network you will take with you when you finish your MBA?"

Asked about the general profile of students coming at IIM-Calcutta, the Dean of Programme Initiatives Prof Anup K Sinha says: "By and large, the young generation applying to IIM-Calcutta is close to one another in terms of personality and background, how they are brought up, the books they read and so on."

Premchand Palety, Director of C-fore, a marketing research agency that conducts the yearly Outlook-C-fore Indian b-school rankings, says: "The IIMs were made to create entrepreneurs but are generating mostly managers. The CAT only tests hard quantitative skills and leaves out other aspects of a candidate's personality. How will you find the leaders this way?"

According to him, the IIM admissions process comprising CAT, group discussion and a personal interview is more of a rejection process than a selection one. Companies and investment banks hire from IIMs because they are looking for brilliant number crunchers, which the CAT effectively picks out for them.

In 2005, 1.6 lakh students took the CAT of which a little over 6,120 candidates got the interview call. If you had a cold on the day of the examination, hard luck. Further, if you were in the top 99.0 percentile in CAT, you probably got an interview call while a candidate with 98.99 percentile was left out. Of course, there is the argument that the 98.99 percentiler could have had better management potential than the 99.0 percentiler. But that is what competitive examinations are all about. IIM-Calcutta's Dean of Programme Initiatives Prof Anup K Sinha defends CAT: "The problem is, if we're going to screen 1,500 students from 1.6 lakh, which is a very tough job, we don't want everybody to max the paper. We want them to tell us that it's tough. So CAT has to be unpredictable and difficult." But is it helping IIMs get quality students? From what it seems, IIMs are losing out on the 500-odd Indians who join global top 50 b-schools abroad every year.

How do foreign b-school admissions take place? First, most foreign b-schools require the GMAT (Graduate Management

Admissions Test) score, an easier test which one can take any time of the year for about $250. Applying to these b-schools involves writing essays on personal achievements and arranging recommendation letters from seniors you have closely worked with.

The essay questions are tricky and become an existential nightmare for applicants who take months to write a satisfactory one.

For Stanford's 2006 applications, students were spellbound to find a simple essay question that read, "What matters most to you, and why?" without any word limit! Plenty of opportunity for an applicant to axe his foot here! The Harvard Business School stole months of happiness out of applicants' life by asking for an essay on "In your career, you will have to deal with many ethical issues. What are likely to be the most challenging and what is your plan for developing the competencies you will need to handle these issues effectively?"

How many us have ever put a thought on having a plan for developing competencies to handle ethical issues!

The key point is, that it is futile to try and fool the admissions committee by writing jargon or inflating personal achievements.

Wharton, for this year's recommendation letters had the following question to the recommending authority, "How would you rate the applicant's sense of humour? (seriously)". To attract the calibre of students that India loses to foreign b-schools annually, the IIMs will have to move towards a similar subjective system of admissions.
-- x --

[Neo2000]

What a beauty of an article!!

While not many will know this, I teach QA and VA on the weekends at an institute in Hyd for CAT-2006. After having appeared for the CAT thrice, I've said the same thing over and over again in all my classes--"CAT is not a selection test, it is a Rejection Test" .Its true. I've felt this way for a long time. Not that it matters to anybody but still

I've often wondered why the IIMs never had a field that distinguished the kind of work-ex a person has. Is it only the number of years that matter?

I havent done all that well in the exam. So there's a part of me that says "What if?" I mean, imagine the joy of beating 1.5lakh students and getting a letter that says "Congratulations on your admission into ____!!" For an average student like me(), I'll probably carry that with me for the rest of my life!! Not to mention the IIM tag !!

Then again, there's the other thing. I know of so many people who deserve to be in an IIM but arent there because of the CAT. Raise your hands all those of you who think that KetanM , PsychoD, Govi,....... should necessarily crack the CAT to get into an IIM?

Random thoughts. Perhaps I am just babbling.

A great article though. Did I mention that ??