After yesterday’s news of the day, many were left disheartened due to fact that IIM Ahmedabad had increased the graduation cut-offs to levels that were beyond most of the aspirants. Quite a few of our students and friends were sad/angry at the decision and it is quite understandable considering the fact that CAT and IIM Ahmedabad are almost synonymous. Let me play a devil’s advocate here and try to answer a few doubts.

Disclaimer: I am in no way related to IIM A or their PR team or anything. If I were an aspirant this year, even I would not have made it through, so it is not about glorifying or degrading the institute. This is more of an elaboration of the comment which I had made on PaGaLGuY.com rather than an article. This is simply an effort to help you get out of the negative mindset that you might be in. No offences meant to anyone.

Is this a logically sound move or one biased against certain sections of the aspirants? What should you do now that you are out of the race even before you put your running shoes on? You will be torn between people who give gyaan asking you to move on with your life, take one on the chin and those who intend to protest against the system. The former look like old farts who have nothing else to do, the latter, the rebellious youth. Who should you side with? Let’s explore.

There is a majority that is being affected by this move: Now, this is obvious. If we plot the scores, a majority has to lie below the cut-off line (Duh! isn’t that what a cut-off is used for). There is this feeling, not entirely misplaced if I may say so, fueled by many ‘vocal’ aspirants time and again, that a majority has been victimized. But then, isn’t IIM Ahmedabad touted as being the toughest institute to get into. Numerous statistics have been thrown around comparing the conversion rates of WIMWI with those of Harvard, Stanford, and the like. Is the college not justified in making sure that people with consistently superior performances throughout their academic career get through? A cursory glance through the last few years’ student profiles is enough to suggest what the institute values.

It takes into data from that part of our lives when even we were not sure of going for an MBA: Completely agree with the premise, but isn’t it the same for everyone else? Few people believe in running every race giving it everything they have while few excel only in the important ones and many, in only a couple of them. Say you are looking for a new member for your team. You do not have any extracurricular achievements, CVs, personal answers, psychometric analysis, etc. in front of you but just the raw 10^th, 12^th and graduation scores. One person has an 80, 80, and 70 on it while the other has an 80, 80, and 71 on it. You have to choose only one at gunpoint. Which one would you choose?

No chance of a comeback: Most of us are late bloomers who feel that CAT is this magic eraser that would undo all our past sins. While this is true to an extent and it does indeed give you a shot at redemption, not all institutes would subscribe to this theory.

It does not normalize the scores across universities: This, I am completely for and guess is the reason most of you must feel offended. There is a difference between the top scorers when you compare it at a university level and one cannot simply put everybody out of contention using a single cut-off. But then again, IIM A must have had hard core stats on how many candidates they can get to choose from. If you already know that even after removing all the ‘advantaged’ toppers, you will be left with a more-than-enough pool of good aspirants, why would you call the surplus?

If the institute is getting that many people above the said academic criteria then I think it should be the institute’s prerogative as to when and how they eliminate the rest. It is like proposing to a girl; sometimes, she might play along till it’s too late, sometimes she might cut you off right away. Now that doesn’t mean that you are bad or you don’t love her more than anyone else but still… Get the gist? The same holds true for almost everything in life.

Please don’t get me wrong for all the above points. Even I have been on the sidelines wondering what hit me. I have gone from loving IIM A (yes we all do at some point in time) to hating IIM A (yes we all do at some point in time) to being in the current position where I can’t believe I cared so much about something that would have not been able to make me the person that I am today. One thing I know, you always have a chance; that of making sure that you use your opportunity in a better manner rather than thinking about how others use theirs’.

Also, it is high time you realize that the institute doesn’t make you but you make the institute. It is just a bunch of letters at the end of the day. If A snubs you, there is a B, C, L, XL, FMS and the list goes on. There is no way I can believe that one letter is better than the other. Most of you I interact with are brilliant candidates and have an awesome future ahead of you that an institute cannot possibly take away from you. You are the brand!! So, stop cribbing and thinking emotionally, get up, dust yourself and do well in CAT. It will do more harm to you than good to keep this thing going on in your mind.

PS: They can take you out of A but they can’t take the A out of you!

I hope I have incensed people just enough so that they can vent out their anger on CAT 2015 and not me.