IIM BLACKI, Top nonIIM B schools - From CAT to Admissions

With people knowing their raw scores in the test, the excitement of the CAT 2019 results, likely to be announced in the first week of January is somewhat muted. I think it will still have one significant outcome snd that is the scaled scores. This will be particularly important if you are in the marginal scores for important calls.

Let me give you one example that illustrates the point well. Last year a person with a raw score of 172 in slot 1 just missed the bus for an IIMC call as his score was scaled down to 170. Another person who had 170 in slot 2 got his score scaled up just enough to make it to an IIMC call. I know both of them well as they were mentored by me, The first person is studying in XLRI now and the second person who converted his IIMC call is now studying there.

What do I think will happen this year? Well, the scaled score for 99 percentile will probably be in the range of 160-163. The corresponding raw scores will probably be 162-165 in slot 1 and 158-161 in slot 2. These are of course estimates but the larger point in this is as follows - your scores in slot 1 will be scaled down by a couple of marks and scaled up by a similar amount in slot 2. The actual scaling involves a lot of complex calculations but what I am saying here is the likely end result. Note that the 2 marks I am predicting may well be 1.5 but the overall direction will be the same.

So if you are in slot 1 hold on to your celebrations till you see your scaled scores. Similarly slot 2 people who are in the margin need not feel hopeless at all, the results may yet be a pleasant surprise to you. Finally, what is the likely cutoff for General category people for an IIMC call. I think if you are in slot 1 your raw score of 176 should take you there. Slot 2 people with 171 or so can hope for an IIMC call too. Feel free to ask me any questions by commenting here or by sending me a direct message, 

Just wanted to share something with all readers here. I have been involved in this forum since 2015 and must have advised close to a 1000 people or more by now. I find it as an ideal medium to share my skills, knowledge and expertise in the area of B school admissions. Till 2018 I only gave advise to seekers and groomed people in my own circle. I expanded this to formal mentoring services in 2019, again being motivated by some people from here who had initially spoken to me with an intent of being mentored by me. I had no idea that it will expand to 57 students but it was a great experience to get so many people get into top B schools. The success rate was near perfect and the best was to get 11 people in the first open list of FMS that has 101 people. This had a natural progression of my mentoring some people for CAT 2019 and it grew to 25 in time. After CAT 2019, I have started a program for WAT/PI preparations and have already got 20 people signing up. I hope to do this program for about 50 people and am confident of getting all of them to top B schools. Note that while I mentor only these many people directly, I help many others in terms of advising them on their profiles, likely calls and career plans. This is apart from the posts I write in the forum that must have helped countless people, many of who have approached me and said so :-) I do understand that we live in cynical times where anyone who does things without any apparent motive it is seen with suspicion. Also, it is easy to bandy around words like fraud, scamster etc very loosely. I always view this as a sign of frustration and weakness in the preson who writes this. A disagreement or query can be expressed in civilized manner and language, a lack of it is a worry for people who are going to be future managers. As for people who are curious or doubtful about who I am, my name can be easily searched in LinkedIn or Quora and there are some references to me in internet too. Finally, being trolled is an occupational hazard for people like me, whether as a CEO or in this forum and I do not care about it. My response is just to block the user and move on with life :-) For those of you wanting either genuine advice or to be part of my mentoring programs, all you need to do is send me a message with all your details and I will definitely get back to you.

Many people are already thinking of CAT 2020, as they are not happy with their CAT 2019 performance. I think you need to check out what happens in the calls before taking a decision on this. However, if you are committed to it for some reason then which are the colleges that you should aim for CAT 2020? Well, this will depend a lot on the individual but, over the years, I have made a framework that works well in most situations. I think you should look at these 13 colleges and more importantly at the 3 tiers where these are clustered.

Tier 0 : IIM ABC

Tier 1 : IIM L, XLRI, FMS

Tier 2 : IIM KI, SP Jain, MDI Gurgaon, IIT B, NITIE, IIFT

Within the tiers there are no rankings, all colleges can be considered equal. So how does the decision making criteria work here? See below:-

1. If you are confident of a college admission in a tier then take CAT 2020 only for a higher tier college. So if you have gor an offer from SP Jain then you should only drop it for XLRI , FMS or IIM ABC etc.

2. If you have taken only 1 CAT so far it is all right to aim for a better college. If you have taken 2 CATs then drop a college in tier 1/2 only if you are really hopeful of a tier 0 college by getting the required score in CAT 2020.

3. Hope for a tier 0 college only if you have stellar academic credentials, if not then even 99.8 percentile in CAT will not help ( esp if you are GEM )

4. For IIM ABCL, SP Jain and NITIE work ex will really make a difference.

5. Gender or academic diversity will always help open category candidates.

6. Reserved category people are a law unto themselves and they always have a chance, irrespective of their scores or lack of it.

Happy to answer questions as usual but with the above you should be able to figure out your own situation and decide if CAT 2020 makes sense for you .

Is it necessary to start the WAT/PI preparations right now or can we wait till the actual results are declared and the calls announced. Well, if you are having a score where calls are uncertain then you should do so. However, if you have a good score that will logically enable you to get the calls you are aspiring for then you need to get started on your preparations. In fact I think you are already late by 7 days, given that you knew your scores a week back.

Why do I say so? Understand that the preparation for WAT/PI is very different from CAT 2019. Many test takers had good aptitude for the kind of questions that are asked in CAT and most of the serious test takers would have taken coaching and mock tests to get ready. However, the requirements of WAT/PI are such that very few people will be able to do it on their own skills or aptitude. I can say this with great certainty as every year I see so many people who do badly in this round and go back to try for another year.

Understand that IIMA and IIMB will call about 600 General category people and take about 200 of them, corresponding figures for IIMC are 900 and 230 respectively. Your probability of getting an admission in the initial list is only about 25 to 33 percent. This is made more difficult by the fact that you are competing with really brilliant people who have got these 3 calls. For other top B schools the situation is the same. You need to, therefore, give yourself the best chance by kickstarting your preparations right now.

Note that I am not writing this post to promote my mentoring program at all. I do not run my program as a commercial enterprise and can only take on about 50 people ( last year it was 57 ), whereas the number of people who read this post should be in a few thousands I hope !! Yes, if you are interested in my program, feel free to reach out to me BUT it is way more important that you get started in some manner immediately. I hope you realize the seriousness of this and act in a manner to enhance your chances of getting that coveted seat in your dream B school.

If you have questions on the stage 2 process of any top B school, feel free to ask me. Do provide your full name and all other relevant details when you do so.

Let me give some data points for people trying to estimate their scores for IIM B. You can use these to estimate for your boards. All these are CBSE for X and XII, IIT or BITS for Engineering.

1. X at 95 % will get you about 14-15. Even 94 % will reduce this to 13, 93 % will be 12. Anything below 85 % will be at best 8. Below 80 % it can be only 5-6.

2. Same for XII though here the scores need to be halved as it is out of 10.

3. For Engineering CGPA - above 9.5 will be 16, 9.3 will be 14-15, 9 will be 12-13, 8.7 to 8.9 can be 11, 8.5 can be 10. Below this you can estimate.

4. For non-engineering add 2 for similar range of CGPA.

Hope this gives you some idea.

I wanted to give an update on my Mentoring program, only in the groups that I have created. So far 20 people have joined in the program and I have started it off this week. The participants are quite diverse - there are people who have scored 200 in CAT and have great academic credentials but there are also people in the range of 140 or so who are probably looking at only 2-3 colleges as options and need to convert one of them. I am confident that all of them will get into a good B school, last year I had 57 people in the program and all of them got into a B school of their choice out of the calls they had received.

There is a special offer I have for the people in this group. I will give you 3 sessions of XAT inputs if you join in the program this weekend. So in addition to converting your CAT calls, you will also have great chances of doing well in XAT. If you are interested send me your full name, academic details, CAT score details and your mobile number connected to WhatsApp. I will then get back to you and see how we can engage together.

I look forward to hearing from you - be quick though as I will be only able to add another 10 people to the program as of now :-) Do not be hesitant to approach me because of your scores in CAT or previous background - I am happy to work with all people, indeed it gives me greater pleasure to take on challenges and get people admission when theit chances are not high otherwise :-)