The Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad (IIM-A) has opposed the eligibility criteria stated by the government for admission to the doctoral programmes offered by the IIMs.
The HRD Ministry declared to all 20 business schools previous month allowing them to take students with a four-year bachelor’s degree directly into the PhD programme. The term period of the doctoral course for such candidates is fixed at four years and only those with a minimum of eight CGPA or equivalent are eligible to apply.
In case of the three-year doctoral programme, the Ministry has explained that candidates 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.
IIM-A Director Erol D’Souza has opposed to the above criteria, especially the requirement for two-year diploma and a Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) of eight for applicants with an engineering background.
“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 per cent 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,” IIM-A Director Erol D’Souza said.
“As per the latest notification, none of those who qualified for the doctoral programme in the past would get admission today. Many of them are currently teaching in the IIMs. So with this notification, you are basically saying that those guys are worthless,” he added.
