GD, PI wait begins

Updated on: Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Kolkata: The wait may be over for lakhs of B-school aspirants with Sunday’s declaration of CAT results. But most candidates who’ve cracked the written exam are yet to get calls for the next hurdles — the Group Discussion (GD) and Personal Interview (PI).

IIM, Ahmedabad — this year’s CAT coordinator — and IIM, Shillong, are the only IIMs that have come out with their GD and PI cut-off lists while holidays came in the way of the other IIMs declaring their lists. City coaching centres claimed that their students had fared considerably well this year.

“We will decide in a day or two on the date to release the list,” confirmed a source in IIM-Calcutta. “This year the competition will be tough since the number of days to prepare for GD and PI will be fewer. The institute will take in 462 students and plans to send call letters to 3 to 3.5 times that number of candidates,” added the source.

“We will soon come out with a cut-off list,” said Debashish Chatterjee, director of IIM-Kozhikode whose institute will take in 300 students. IIMLucknow is also expected to publish its list in a day.

“More calls have been received by a larger number of student than to last year,” said Charanpreet Singh, director, formal education, IMS — an MBA coaching centre. His view was echoed by Naveen Saraf of Career Launcher.

Singh further said, “With the long and uncertain wait for CAT results over, candidates need to look forward. The window for them to seek and gain admission to the Bschool of their choice is much smaller because of the delayed results. So they need to manage time better, make quick decisions regarding the institutes they wish to apply to and be very focussed on their preparation for the next phase of the selection process – the group discussion and interviews. The ratio of the number of interview calls to actual selection is about 3:1. So, there is still some way to go and candidates need to train themselves to enhance their chances of making it.”

City boy Ayush Kedia, a NIT Durgapur passout, is one among those who have scored a hundred percentile. “This was my third attempt at CAT. I knew that I was close enough to cracking the exam. However, such a high percentile is definitely unexpected. Now, I am trying to improve my general awareness and also gather thorough knowledge about IT dataware housing which is my domain,” said Kedia who is currently working with TCS.

IIM-Calcutta first year student Hariharan Sriram had received calls from the six IIMs last year and cracked four including IIM-K, IIM-L and IIMI. “The students can now anticipate their current position and start preparing. The results are evenly late, so no one will gain out of it. The competition will be uniform and tough. A student should know the dynamics of the industry and have a good idea of the basics. One should brush up one’s general knowledge, stop worrying and focus on improving vocabulary skills,” Sriram concluded.

GD, PI wait begins

More Education news