Anyone aware of the demographics of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) will know that two groups are heavily represented on campus; the two are the engineers and the men. The IIMs are now rethinking their admissions policies in order to correct such overrepresentation. For several years, classrooms at the IIMs were almost uniformly populated by men who were engineers. The students were generally young men who thought similarly, used identical logic, and took decisions that were alike, since the engineering campuses they came from hardwired them to behave in a particular fashion.

In an attempt to correct the imbalance and break the monotony of these two singularly large constituencies that have been grabbing seats for years at the IIMs, the management schools have decided to award special marks to girls and non-engineering students.  All the six new IIMs and the ones at Lucknow and Kozhikode feel it is time to rebalance the gender scales in office spaces.  Some of the decisions taken to promote diversity in gender and academics are:

• IIM Rohtak will give 20 marks to each girl and another 20 to a non-engineer
• IIM-Raipur will add 30 marks to the overall scores of each girl non-engineer
• IIM-Lucknow has decided to grant 5 marks to each girl and two to non-engineers.

IIM-L admissions chairman Arunabha Mukhopadhyay explains, “It’s for the first time that we have taken a conscious decision to make the diversity on our campus richer. Hence apart from the CAT scores, academic performance in class X and at the graduation level, and work experience, we will award marks for two diversity factors—gender and academics.”

Seven IIMs released their admission criteria months before the Common Admission Test. The new IIMs have decided to do away with group discussions and will instead jointly hold a Written Ability Test (WAT).  Explaining the logic behind the decision, IIM-Trichy director Prafulla Agnihotri says that “the aim of the GDs was to test candidates’ communication skills, their convincing prowess, their leadership abilities and their teamwork. But then many students get coached to participate in GDs.  And sometimes, students who can’t raise their voices and are not aggressive just go unheard.” The older management schools—IIM-Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta, Lucknow, Kozhikode, Indore—will expect students to clear a “writing task” as well as conduct GDs and personal interviews.