To conduct the ranking of India’s best B-schools, Drshti Strategic Research Services designed a detailed and rigorous methodology involving inputs from all the stakeholders—B-schools, recruiters, faculty and students. The initial task comprised referring to a comprehensive list of B-schools from previous years’ participants followed by drawing up new institutes across the country that were eligible to participate with those who offered a two-year full-time management course, and recognised by a government body such as the AICTE, NAAC and AIU. As a pre-requisite, the institutes needed to have a minimum of three batches that have graduated and must be at least five years old in order to be eligible to participate for the rankings.
Parameters and sub-parameters that are considered essential when rating a B-school have been evolved in consultation with industry experts, and weightages were assigned accordingly. Most of the parameters and sub-parameters have been kept unchanged from last year to ensure consistency and comparability. However, weightages were revised upwards over the past two years for parameters such as incubation centre/entrepreneurship cell, funded start-ups, management development programmes (MDP) and Average package. At the same time, there is a marginally increased emphasis on research facilitation, entrepreneurship and industry exposure that seem to be gaining importance among recruiters.
Various B-schools across India were contacted for participation, among which 145+ B-schools responded and provided their objective data within the stipulated time. This includes 21 institutes which did not participate last year. The objective survey was supported by a perceptual survey conducted among key stakeholders - students, faculty and recruiters in 16 major cities (Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Chennai, Calcutta, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Bhubaneswar, Udaipur, Bhopal, Shillong, Coimbatore and Indore). Questionnaire-based surveys were conducted on InfoMonsta (www.infomonsta.com)—a seamless, high-speed and flexible survey platform for data gathering, management and analytics. Infomonsta web links allowed us to reach 950 permanent faculties and 4250 MBA/PGDM students to understand their outlook about their institute, thereby gathering extensive perceptual data. In addition, perceptual ratings of B-schools were obtained from 500 recruiters/Industry professionals. To ensure authenticity, an audit mechanism for institutes was in place which included physical audits to verify the authenticity of the data provided by B-schools. Trained field executives visited institutes for this purpose. Suspicious and questionable data given by some B-schools were eliminated from the exercise by an experienced research team.
Points obtained by colleges on the five parameters were derived on the basis of the data provided by the institutes and summed together to arrive at the final objective scores. The perceptual ranking was derived by allotting weightage of 40, 30 and 30 percentage to the perceptions of recruiters/industry professionals, faculty members and students respectively. Data examination comprised statistical techniques involving correlation and regression analysis conducted by Drshti researchers. Next, to reach the final composite scores, total perceptual and objective scores were given equal weightage of 50 per cent each and the total scores were combined to arrive at the final scores and rankings.
Research activities and analysis on the side of “Drshti Strategic Research Services” was undertaken by A.K. Balaji Prasad, Jignesh Bafna and Sudarshan Raghavan.
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Weightages 2018
- 270 Placements
- 195 Infrastructure & facilities
- 180 Academic excellence
- 220 Selection process
- 135 Personality Development & Industry exposure
