IIM-Ahmedabad Director Erol D’Souza has written to the Secretary of Higher Education, R Subrahmanyam, objecting the newly implemented criteria for Ph.D. for doctoral applicants for the respective course offered by the IIMs across the country.
Based on the new rules, applicants with a four-year bachelor’s degree and an 8 CGPA can directly apply for the Ph.D. programme, but, applicants with a three-year degree should either have a master’s degree or a two-year PG diploma or a professional qualification such as CA/ICWA/CS with B.Com.
D’Souza said, “If we look at our admission record (for the doctoral programme) from the past decade, almost half of our students are engineers and roughly 60 percent of them have had a CGPA of less than eight. The reason we don’t focus only on CGPA is because we also ask for a statement of purpose and conduct an hour-long personal interview. So it’s a holistic assessment of which CGPA is just one of the things we consider.”
He added that there are teachers if IIM who received their Ph.D. from the institute itself by clearing the previous eligibility criteria which required just one-year PG Diploma for admissions. He also said why something should be changed if it has been working perfectly fine.