Time to Re-Engineer CAT and MBA Recruitments!

In the year 2000 at IIM Ahmedabad-70% were Engineers & 30% were non engineers. This dangerous dominance of engineers in IIMs further rose to such an extent that just after 10 years in 2010 at IIM Ahmedabad, 94.4% engineers got admitted & merely 5.6% non engineers could seek admission. This proves that the coterie controlling IIMs is completely dominated by engineers turned MBAs who design the CAT structure, & specially the quantitative section with a strong bias in favour of engineers &  deprive lakhs of commerce, management, economics & other non- technical stream graduates of their legitimate right to enter IIMs.

When a student completes his high schooling, he has an ambition & joins a course as per his liking, desire & aspirations for future. If he intends to do MBA & work in the field of Banking & Financial services then he will definitely opt for commerce, management, economics etc., for graduation & on the other hand those students who want to become  engineers  in future will definitely join engineering graduation course. But  during the engineering course, they are lured by pure monetary greed of high MBA salaries and the faulty and biased structure of CAT further propels engineers to continuously crowd out candidates from other streams.

Government spends billions of rupees in the form of subsidies and incentives to promote technical education & these engineering graduates misuse government funds by joining banking and financial services, which amounts to fraudulent activity & a massive corruption in education.

If not GMAT, then at least model the CAT on the lines of GMAT which is perfectly balanced, and unbiased with equal emphasis on logical reasoning, verbal & quantitative skills. Besides, two essays also carry significant weightage. Why the most sought after B –Schools such as Harvard, Columbia, Wharton, Yale, Stanford follow GMAT for admissions? Because they trust quality and respect diverse background in the class. In Stanford, 36% students are engineers & 64% are non-engineers. In Harvard, 33% students are engineers & 67% non-engineers. Benchmarking studies have shown that a student who gets a high score of 720 in GMAT will typically get around 92 percentile in CAT, proving that 92 percentile in CAT is adequate quantitative & verbal proficiency; and beyond that, IIMs should look at other factors such as leadership, communication, expository writing,  people skills, and above all, the student’s knowledge in the field of finance, commerce and management. With inclusion of these factors, a 92 percentiler  will be far better than a current 100 percentiler. Every year, out of a few lakh non-engineer  students, even if 1% are brilliant, which amounts to a few thousand, then they certainly deserve to enter IIM’s.

Had GMAT been the admission criteria, then even in India the ratio of non-engineers to engineers would have been similar in the IIMs as it is in Harvard or Stanford. So this article is not against engineers but against the complete dominance of engineers as around 33% of engineers will still enter IIMs even if CAT structure is changed.

Vedika Bhandarkar, IIM Ahemdabad Graduate & former MD and Head of Investment Banking, at JP Morgan India & now MD & Vice Chairman India, Credit Suisse strongly recommends to change CAT structure saying that very few women come to engineering colleges & so very few enter IIMs & with this gender disparity fewer women are recruited through IIMs. She is against reservations for women in higher education but emphasizes that since CAT has very high math component so adopting GMAT format could be the best solution.

IIM Calcutta professor Jankiraman Moorthy, convener of CAT 2011, speaks about making several changes in the pattern of CAT 2011. Every year a new convener makes changes in the pattern but nobody dares (except Prof. Soumendra Bagchi of XLRI, this year) to change the structure, with the fear that engineers will loose their dominance in financial world and other deserving candidates with gender equality will enter the IIMs. Moorthy clearly admits that had the exam been clearly in his hands, he would have introduced “writing component” in CAT, like in GMAT to identify writing skills of the candidates; and few more changes to find other ways to get more brilliant, value oriented and students with value ethics. It proves the dearth of these above mentioned qualities in the current IIM students, which is indirectly confessed by Moorthy. He further admits that till now, IIMs had most of the successful candidates with skewed efficiency and skewed scores. Many have suggested in the past to implement low cut-offs for non-engineering students and girls.

How a person with technical background, just studying management for 2 years, heads banking and financial services? Let’s take an example of a bank and a financial services company. In YES BANK, out of 10 directors, 5 are engineering graduates, 1 – BE mechanical, 1 BSc., 1 Maths, one law and just one commerce graduate. In case of EDELWEISS, out of 10 directors, 2 are pure engineers, one is chemical engineer (head of their life insurance dept) , one is electronics engineer, one is electrical engineer, and the other is metallurgical engineer (co-heads of their asset management dept), 3 are commerce graduates and 1 is CA & law graduate. Its shocking that in these two core banking and financial services, out of 20 directors, 13 are purely technical & what are these metallurgical, electrical , chemical, electronic engineers and Bsc graduates doing here? Why did they graduated in these streams if they wanted to work in the field of banking and finance?!! Its just monetary greed, faulty CAT pattern, and more so, the real culprits are also many irresponsible human resource heads who irrelevantly recruit technical stream graduates to financial sector. And if this is the condition of the top level management, then one can imagine the quantum of engineers turned MBAs working at the other levels of hierarchy of these financial organizations- depriving non-engineering  graduates of their rightful place.

These technical stream graduates completing MBA could be recruited to any sector except banking and financial sector. They have a plethora of sectors such as manufacturing, engineering, capital goods, pharma, chemical, power, Metals, telecom, refineries, oil drilling, electronic and electrical equipment etc., &  these sectors  would  benefit  more with their combined technical and MBA expertise. But, what a pity!!… At least one sector must be spared for non-technical streams as they cannot work on machines whereas engineers can.

Recently, SCMHRD Pune (flagship institute of Symbiosis) introduced MBA in Infrastructure Management in which only civil, electrical & mechanical engineers are eligible to apply. Now if this is the prerequisite condition for MBA in Infrastructure Management, then the eligibility criteria for all PGDM courses in IIMs and other Management Institutes (as well as MBA in Finance, Banking etc.,) should strictly be graduation from nontechnical streams.

FMS Delhi, is more biased than CAT. CAT at least has 2 sections now to balance Maths with English But in FMS, out of approx. 200 questions, Engineering students with skewed scores & skewed efficiency just attempt maths & get a good percentile with no English proficiency at all.

All this proves that there is something terribly wrong with CAT structure. Its time to RE-ENGINEER  CAT & MBA RECRUITMENTS.