IIMs raise the cutoff bar, entry becomes tougher

Getting into IIMs is never easy.

When the Indian Institutes of Management announced the cut-off percentiles for the admission process on Wednesday, a few of the IIMs had raised their cutoffs.

Like IIM Ranchi, which had the highest cut-off of 99.65 percentile among all IIMs last year, has further raised it to 99.66 for the 2011-13 batch. At IIM-Calcutta, Ranchi's mentoring institute, the cutoff is 99.59. IIM Ahmedabad announced that 540 students whose overall percentile is 99 and of each section were 94 would be called for the personal interview. IIM Lucknow, which is one of the CAT 2010 organising institutes, has increased the weightage to CAT scores.

What was 30% for the CAT scores has gone up to 37.5% for the next batch. The fees, too, have been raised from Rs 8 lakh to 12 lakh. IIM Kozhikode has also decided to give 50% weightage to CAT score, 15% to GD and social skills, personal interview 25% and writing task 10%.

Interestingly, many IIMs are set to take in more women and non-engineering students to increase the diversity in the institute. IIM-L has decided to give 2.5 more points for these candidates. The directors of newer IIMs will meet next week to decide on holding joint PIs and GDs.

The scores for the Common Admission Test (CAT) 2010 were released on Wednesday. There are eight candidates who scored 100 percentile and 19 with 99.99 percentile. Of the latter group, two are women — one from Kerala and the other from Andhra Pradesh. And all of them are engineers.

While many students found it difficult to access results online, the IIMs said that the website did not crash. "The highlight of the day was that the website did not crash despite around two lakh students checking the result on the web. The fact that it was slow was something that was impossible to help," said Himanshu Rai, convener, CAT. However, the rumours that the CAT results had leaked in the first week of January turned out to be true.