The Regional Rankings for each city portray the preferences of candidates familiar with the colleges. In that sense, these are the most preferred regional-level b-schools for each of the featured cities - Mumbai, Jaipur, Chennai and Hyderabad.

Most college included in the regional rankings accept the Management Aptitude Test (MAT). So if you have taken the MAT exam and are looking for a college in one of these cities that accepts the MAT score, you should consult the rankings to find out how people from that city stack the b-schools with respect to each other.

We originally set out to rank the most preferred regional level schools in a total of eight cities, subject to sufficient sample size and consistency in the resultant rankings. Eventually, we were able to generate consistent rankings for four of those cities - Jaipur, Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad.

Surveys for the PaGaLGuY B-school Rankings 2010 were delivered in a way that regional b-schools in each city could be compared by respondents from that city/region. While the surveys were going on, a lot of respondents expressed concern that they had never heard of the b-schools they were asked to compare, and that the regional rankings might not be credible.

Our hypothesis turned out right in the end wherever we had enough respondents, and this is how we validated it (see the last heading, 'Checking for validity of the rankings'). We did not release a rankings for cities that did not qualify the validation criteria.