New IIMs may hold interviews at one place

Updated on: Monday, May 02, 2011

Seat selection on the lines of the Indian Institutes of Technology, common admission criteria and single-location group discussion and personal interviews: these are some key reforms the new bunch of Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) could usher in next year while picking candidates through from one of the toughest B-school admission tests in the world.

At a meeting with the ministry of human resources development last week, directors and chairpersons of the six new IIMs proposed common admission criteria where sectional cut-offs in the Common Admission Test and other weightages will be equal among them.

IIMs at Rohtak, Trichy and Raipur already had such criteria for the 2011-13 batch. Other IIMs at Ranchi, Udaipur and Kashipur will join this system next year. On the anvil is also a system where new IIMs will conduct counselling for prospective students to aid admissions. “Since we’ll have common interviews and group discussions, we felt the idea should be taken forward and centralised counselling could be held to allow candidates to pick the IIM they want to join,” said M J Xavier, director, IIM Ranchi.

For the next year, IIMs have favoured a single-location interview so that candidates with multiple offers needn’t hop from one city to another. This year, interviews were held at Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata. The HRD ministry will ask all 13 IIMs to follow the single-location interview system for next year, allowing older IIMs the autonomy to hold separate personal interviews and group discussions. The older IIMs have in the past rejected the idea of having a common GD/ PI.

“The idea has been appreciated by the ministry and even the mentoring IIMs,'' said IIM Trichy director Prafulla Agnihotri.

New IIMs may hold interviews at one place

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