A brief guide to top IIMs selection criteria

If you are among those thousands of people hoping to land one of the 3,335 seats across the 13 Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) then here are some pointers for you to go about admission.  With the Common Admission Test (CAT) Results are all set to be announced on January 14, the process to land up one of those coveted IIM calls will be based on many factors.

The individual IIMs have decided on their selection criteria; the call letters will go out later based on how students have fared overall.  Here is a list of the things that the top six older IIMs look for when selecting a candidate. There were two sections in CAT with section 1 having Quantitative Ability (QA) and Data Interpretation (DI) while section 2 had Verbal Ability (VA) and Logical Reasoning (LR). The cut offs are different for both sections.

Percentiles: The top of the table is occupied by IIM Ahmedabad which has reportedly relaxed the minimum overall percentile to make it to the shortlist with 85 being the cut off limit for both sections and 90 overall. IIM Bangalore has 80 for section 1 and 90 for section 2 with overall cut off at 90. The oldest of the lot, IIM Calcutta, has kept the highest cut-off for shortlisting candidates at 95 percentile overall. IIM Kozhikode has brought back sectional cut-offs besides increasing the overall cut-off to 90. IIM Lucknow and IIM Indore have 85 as cut off for both sections with 90 being the overall cut off percentile.

Institute	Section 1	Section 2	Total percentile
IIM Ahmedabad	85	85	90
IIM Bangalore	80	90	90
IIM Calcutta	90	90	95
IIM Lucknow	85	85	90
IIM Kochi	80	80	90
IIM Indore	85	85	90

Work Experience: One of the major factors for admissions into IIMs over the years has been the work experience. It has been reported that work experience gets rewarded at most of the IIMs apart from IIM Ahmedabad and Indore. Apparently IIM Kozhikode has brought back work experience in the shortlisting criteria while IIM Bangalore and IIM Lucknow give work experience weightage as well. IIM Calcutta allocates points for different levels of work experience, the highest being eight points for 31-36 months of work experience and 0 for less than six months.

Stress on academic diversity: Engineering is by the far the most common stream from which the students seem to have done well in CAT. It has been reported that already some institutes have been trying to address that with academic diversity scores. IIM-A has reportedly introduced a provision for direct shortlist to the written aptitude test-personal interview round for the top 1% among five academic disciplines. IIM Bangalore gives weightage to professional courses (only CA/CS). IIM Lucknow awards three points for diversity in academic qualifications.

Gender Diversity:  Finally we have gender diversity issue for which the B-Schools are actively trying resolve with more admissions through various ways. As with engineering colleges, there have been efforts to bring in more parity in gender. It has been reported that IIM Calcutta will continue to award three points to women for gender diversity. It introduced the practice last year. IIM Kozhikode and IIM Lucknow too give extra points to women on the gender diversity front. However, IIM Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Indore continue to not give any extra points to women.