For all those who were unhappy with the imposition of stream-wise cutoffs and were unhappy about not being able to even compete for that enviable IIM Ahmedabad seat, there is some good news. IIM Ahmedabad has, it seems, decided to roll back the controversial bit in the original shortlisting criteria and allow a larger pool of applicants to apply to the institute without any fear of being rejected. You can read the revised official document here on IIM Ahmedabad’s official website.
While the entire document has virtually remained exactly the same, the major change is in the absence of the graduation stream wise cut offs that were seen in the first version of the document. While we would not really call the original version ‘draconian’ as was coined by a few others it certainly limited the ability of an aspirant to compensate for the minor hiccoughs during the first half of his/her career.
So, what does the new version translate into?
(i) First of all, it opens up the admissions to everybody who have cleared the CAT cut-offs and the average of the 10th plus 12th standard scores
(ii) With 70% weight given to your CAT score, a strong CAT score can actually take you through to the interviewer’s table at IIM Ahmedabad
(iii) Essentially it means that if someone has a lower AR score, one would need an equal amount of gain in terms of marks scaled down to out of 70 to counter the disadvantage. So, to gain a difference of 1 mark out of 70, you would need to have a score difference equal to ~4.3 marks out of 300
All said and done, this news from IIM Ahmedabad has brought a sigh of relief and has infused fresh enthusiasm among the aspirants to put in that bit extra to get into arguably the best b-school in the country.
