Four IIMs among eight in Business Standard's top B-school bracket

New Delhi: India’s management education fraternity has delivered its judgment on the country's top business schools. Among the top B-schools in India (mentioned alphabetically here) are the Indian Institutes of Management in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata and Indore; Management Development Institute at Gurgaon; National Institute of Industrial Engineering in Mumbai; Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar; and XLRI, Jamshedpur.

The BS Best B-School Survey 2012 has been conducted by Business Standard in association with IMRB International, a leading market research agency in India, and the results of the thirteenth survey of B-schools are available in the May 2012 issue of the Indian Management, which is now on stands.

The survey does not aim to rank the institutes, but puts them in 14 hierarchical categories: Super League 1, Super League 2, A1 through A8, and B1 through B4. The scores have been allotted on two broad parameters—audit scores and perception scores. The final score is a weighted aggregate, which has been used to put the institutes in one of the 14 categories that have been worked out.

The audit module is comprehensive—it takes into account a range of elements such as intellectual capital, infrastructure, admissions and placements, industry interface, governance and the scale of operations, each of which can be measured objectively. The perception scores take into account the viewpoint of the industry and the alumni.

This makes the survey of B-schools totally objective, unbiased and transparent, and helps benchmark the management institutes in addition to providing authentic information to all the stakeholders.

The survey is open to business schools all over India. The eligibility criterion is that they should be approved by the All India Council for Technical Education or the government or a university. Also, at least two batches of students should have passed out of the institute. This is to assess the placements that happen at the campus. The questionnaires are sent to all approved B-schools, and they are requested to revert with the completed questionnaires to IMRB. Each completed questionnaire is thoroughly scrutinised for missing and misrepresented data, if any. The data are checked against the previous years’ figures to discover and subsequently validate any major changes. Following this, a query sheet is generated for and cross-checked with each institute, through e-mail, phone or personal visits.

For the latest survey, questionnaires were sent to 2,400 business schools. About 200 schools sent their entries within the time limit. We had to drop a few institutions from the final 197 that appear this year because the data supplied by them were incomplete or there were some unexplained deviation from the data presented last year. We are glad to note there were 63 new entrants in the list this year compared to last year.