The Business Today recently ranked ISB 8th in its B-school rankings. This letter was written to the newspaper by Dinker Vasisht, Director, Marketing and Communications, Graduate Student Board.

Sir,

We are currently pursuing our Post Graduate Programme in Management (PGPM), from Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. We thank you for ranking our institution in top ten of your annual survey but at the same point, we point out to several inadequacies in your survey process. Though you have given a write-up on your methodology, it does not throw light on whether your research was sufficiently granular.

a) For instance, in the HR and functional head category, you have not mentioned the backgrounds of the companies whose employees responded to this survey. Are these top league companies? As pupils we studied in Chandigarh and Kolkata and it was very surprising to see that Chandigarh had the same sample size under this head as Bangalore. Kolkata has a higher sampler size than Bangalore and Hyderabad. Similarly Patna has a higher sample size in this category than Bangalore and Hyderabad. Certainly, this is an inappropriate geographical representation of the spread of top business organizations in India. Similar glaring inadequacies manifest themselves under other heads as well.

b) Sparse details have been offered where detailed explanations about the methodology of the survey should have been provided. For instance, what sort of MBA aspirants have you considered? The average age of class of 2012 in ISB is 28 years and on an average the candidates have 5 years work experience. So the profile of a potential MBA candidate is very different from that of an MBA aspirant for IIMs where the average age is 24. Also when you mention that IIM- Bangalore’s primacy in your survey is attributed to “increased thrust on research” you do not explain what the evaluating basis here is. A recent study by the London Business School (LBS states that the number of papers published by ISB faculty in 10 years of its existence are greater than the number of papers  (combined total) published by faculty of IIM-A, B and C. The top ranker IIM-B’s faculty has published 11 papers in 2-decade period from 1990 onwards. The figures have been matched by ISB in less than half that time. Surprisingly, on the faculty perception index, ISB has been ranked 10th. This despite the fact that there is near unanimity about ISB’s superior pedagogy. Professor Prashant Kale, who teaches Competitive Strategy, was recently voted as one amongst the top ten B school professors in the world by the Business Week magazine.

c) We also believe that your yardsticks are wanting at certain places. ISB is the only Indian B School that has been ranked consistently in the top 20 global B school in rankings that are taken very seriously- Financial Times for instance. We believe that use of Perception methodology is incorrect for surveys of such variety as they fail to take relevant objective matrixes into account. Placements, Job Offers, Salaries, International exposure to faculty, infrastructure, peer learning, diversity (a vital element in MBA experience) have been inexplicably ignored.


Dinker Vashisht Marami Kar, Class of 2012