Over 40,000 students wrote the CAT 2006 in Delhi alone

In my previous post, I mentioned that early indications showed that around 30,000 students wrote the CAT (Common Admission Test to the IIMs) in Delhi including the NCR areas. Newspaper reports in the last couple of months gave a similar figure and we thought we were right. But by the time the final figures were compiled from the 56 CAT centres in the region, the figure had changed upwards by more than 35%. Including the centres in Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon over 40,000 students appeared for the Sunday's entrance test to the finest b-schools in India. ( Faridabad and Ghaziabad were not given a centre by the IIMs this year)

That's a staggering number compared to only a few years back when I had written the C.A.T. - in 1999, the figure for the entire country stood at 75,000 or so. Now North India alone has that many people writing the test !! With over 2 lakh applicants now across the country, India is awfully lacking in seats in quality b-schools which means that thousands of good students end up pursuing their MBA dreams from an inferior business school. While at IMS, we constantly ask students to not compromise on their choice of an institute, even suggesting them to wait for an year if need be, it's easier said than done. There are not even 10,000 seats in b-schools you would pass as good. So it's hardly a surprise that lots of our students don't heed our advice in this regard. The industry needs far many more qualified professionals than our system is churning out today and there are enough students inteterested in taking up management as a career option, as can be seen by yesterday's enthusiasm. What we need is more top quality b-schools, and soon.

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Post-script:
IMS has taken a step in this direction setting up a b-school at Kolkata. Praxis, as the new b-school has been christened is an IMS Learning Resources initiative in collaboration with XLRI, Jamshedpur.

My bread-n-butter Sunday

Today, 19th November 2006 is not just any other Sunday। It's the CAT Sunday - as i post this entry over 1,80,000 students are possibly writing a test which may can their lives forever. The Common Admission Test for the six IIMs is a ticket to corporate success, so it's hardly any wonder that the competition is gruelling. So gruelling that even a 99th percentile ( a top 1% score) is sometimes not sufficient to get the all important interview call from the Indian Institutes of Management.

For us working at IMS, the stakes are both higher and lower। While we are not too concerned about our percentiles any more and our own careers insulated from the vagaries of the CAT, the percentiles of thousands of others suddenly become that much more important. While IMS has been sending students to the IIMs by the hundreds every year for over 29 years now, every CAT is a fresh new challenge. The butterflies are back in our stomachs every winters - have we trained our students well enough, have the new changes we incorporated this year been right, have we prepared our students to face the pressure of the percentile game? This year is a bit more exciting since we launched a brand new pedagogy - the ICAP ( Interlinked concepts and applied pedagogy) for the Common Admission Test training programme. The basic idea was simple - the CAT keeps changing, our students should be prepared for any eventuality. Though it was launched only in July and the first proper test will be in November 2007, we did give our 2006 students a few ICAP booster classes. With an interesting case-study based teaching method and the cartoon characters Kittu and Mittu to simplify your mathematics learnings, ICAP is a quantum leap. But the CAT is the real test. Let's see what the students tell us this evening and tomorrow.

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Post script:

Reports from my marketing team out in the field covering the 56 CAT centres in Delhi/NCR indicate that there are close to 30,000 students writing the test this year in the national capital region. It's only getting tougher..