Within a month after my arrival at IIT Madras, the HoD (Head of the Department), Dr. LS Ganesh requested me to participate in the process to select the 2007-2009 batch of MA students. This meant that I had to travel to one of the selection centers, namely New Delhi, with a small team of colleagues from the department.
For the benefit of those at Quinnipiac University who are reading this, the selection into the top twenty business schools in India is extremely competitive. IIT, which is a rather new entrant to the business field is still rated among the top fifteen business schools by virtue of its reputation as a very high quality technical school. After all, much has been said about the student selection process at the IIT of India. I will briefly discuss it here... In short, about 250,000 *self-selected* students apply, and take a very tough technical exam for which they have prepared for at least three years! Finally, when the dust settles, about three thousand very lucky students are selected based on this exam, to pursue engineering programs in one of the seven IITs strewn around the country.
Each IIT campus is a little world on to itself, wit residences for students, faculty and staff, banks, recreation centers, shopping centers, parks, schools for kids, community centers, libraries, etc. The lucky students then go to live here for the next four to five years, taught by pretty well qualified faculty, about a third of whom have their PhDs from predominantly western universities like those from US, UK, Germany, France, etc.
I say *pretty well qualified faculty* because with such stringent selection standards, why would the smart students even need the faculty?!
Anyway, in addition to the technical programs, the IITs also have newly established management programs, and ours is one of those, started in 2004. But just in three years, the IIT Madras daeprtment of management studies (DoMS) has established itself very well in the business community. And true to the practice in India, IITs have gone ahead and devised their own entrance exam for MBA aspirants, even though there are plenty of *management entrance exams* being conducted already by institutes such as the Indian Institute of Management, Xavier Labor Relations Institute, etc. Apparently the IITs want to maintain their uniqueness!
So about 50,000 students take the IITs' MBA selection exam, out of which finally about 300 students get into the programs.
This year, IIT Madras decided to call only those students with the top one thousand ranks for interviews! Approximately, about a thousand or so students are called based on their examination scores, out of which about 350 are selected - 0.7 percent!!!
So imagine my surprise when, upon interviewing some of these prospective students in New Delhi, I noticed that many of them lacked fluency in English! Much has been said about India's competitive advantage due to its population's English skills. However, not much has been siad about how correct and fluent these skills are, especially at the conversational level! And these were the top students in the country! Was something wrong with this picture?
Anyway, we finally selected about sixty students, and these have joined the program since.
More later, about the IIT exam preparation, and the looming crisis in education, etc.
