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And the winner is….

By: posted January 5, 2007

Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad.  That’s right.  According to BusinessWeek, IIM-A (as it is known), ranks as the most selective MBA program and as having the highest avg GMAT for an entering freshmen class.

Although it doesn’t require it, the IIM-A has an average entering freshmen class GMAT score of 750.  That puts IIM-A ahead of Stanford, Wharton, Harvard, Dartmouth, UC Berkeley, Indian School of Business, UCLA, University of Chicago, Insead, MIT, Northwestern and The University of Michigan.

They also beat everyone on selectivity.  IIM-A admits 1% of all applicants.  Compare that to Stanford’s 10%, Wharton’s 21% or even Michigan’s 28%.

You can find this information and more in BusinessWeek’s very cool Full-Time MBA Search feature.

Categories: grockit

  • Nimit

    Actually, according to Wikipedia…IIM-A is even more selective than 1% acceptance rate. In 2005, they admitted only 0.188% of their candidates. Approx. 532 applicants for every open seat.

  • tch-tch

    Your argument falls into what I call as “misleading statistics”IIMA entrance is general CAT taken my thousands of applicants. The “entry barrier” is very low, and therefore everyone applies. There are no essays, applications, high fees, work experience requirements, recommendations – nothing.All the other top schools in the world weed out most people even before the application process, and therefore these numbers are not comparable and do not even make sense.If IIMA followed a similar trend like other top schools -say, the following,1. You have to have 3-7 years experience2. International experience strongly desired3. High GMAT, balanced between verbal and quant4. 2 recommendations5. Interviews6. 6-10 essays on various topics7. Application fee of 10,000 rupees8. Annual fees of 20-30 lakhsYou would suddenly find that only 1/50th or even 1/100th of the current number would apply and suddenly the acceptance rate would be far higher..There are lies and then there are statistics, you know ;)

  • http://grockit.com Farb

    Great to see some lively banter on the posts!I was wondering if someone would notice that about the statistics. Good call tch-tch!The statistics, however, are not a lie. They are valid stats to my understanding. The question is what significance do we attribute to these statistics.tch-tch’s comment is well thought out, presented, and is also insightful.There is still, however, the issue of IIM-A’s GMAT score. What meaning can we ascribe to the statistics here? One question to ask here is ‘How many students are included in that average GMAT score of 750?’Anyways, keep up the discussion!

  • tch-tch

    Farb,My objection is not to the statistics per se, sure – IIMA has less than 1% selectivity when you take the simple ratio of “number-selected/number-applied”, the problem – as you noted too – is that the comparison is not apple to apple.Again “average entry of GMAT score is 750″ is very, very misleading! Mind you, that sample is from a few overseas students who want to be at IIMA – and they probably constitute a very small % of the class, and therefore – it’s meaningless. Just to highlight, if I had 10 overseas Indian students, they would be super competitive and surely have a average GMAT score of 750. Considering that fact that the remaining class does not take GMAT at all, this number makes no sense.I don’t have any grudge against IIMA :) It’s a great school – hey my brother is an IIMA alumnus. My problem is with how we attribute statistics and suddenly claim something to be absolutely great when it’s not. Did you know that when you take absolute numbers, the post MBA salary change is highest for IIMA – anywhere in the world? Again that’s because we start with a low entry salary base that gets inflated. It’s like – for e.g. someone gets into Wharton with a 75K USD salary and exits with 100K, and then someone gets into IIMA with a salary of 10-15K per year and exits with 60K (overseas offer), would that make IIMA far better than Wharton?!Bottomline – IIMA is a great school, no dispute. But it has some way to go before it becomes a truly international class business school.

  • http://gmat.grockit.com Farb

    I have to say tch-tch, your comments read like great GMAT essay responses.You’re absolutely correct when you say that statistics can be very misleading, and in fact, in this case they may very well be.The fact is that a schools reputation has to do with a lot more than its selectivity and its GMAT scores. It has mainly to do with its people be it students, faculty, alumni or administration.If HBS replaced its faculty and students with monkees, nobody would look at it’s graduates as viable employees. HBS’s reputation would instantly disappear. The people at HBS TODAY are what makes it great. While I do not know anything about the faculty at IIMA my guess is that as a whole it’s not in league with HBS, MIT, STANFORD, YALE, MICH. Maybe I’m wrong.