Prof K L Ganesh         IIT Chennai

MANY of the B-School rankings in India, stop at examining and presenting only the peripheral criteria that are way beyond the core function of an institution, which is academics.

Most importantly, they ignore ';structure and scale';, ';syncretistic';, and ';age';, three basic principles among others that ought to be adopted while making any comparison. Of course, public perception is significantly influenced by the ';yummy crap'; that characterises rankings.

Academic output
In mid-October 2009, the International Journal of Production Economics published a survey of academic work done globally in the area of Operations Management over the last 50 years. This intellectual survey (not a shoddy market survey commissioned by the impetuous, undertaken by the incompetent, and used by the ignorant) was conducted by two academician-authors (globally acknowledged experts in the field) independent of any agency.

The Operations Management faculty in all IITs were rated among the best in the world. These kinds of qualitative content of research output, vetted by independent agencies are just not the parameter for any of the rankings.

Curriculum design
The nature and diversity of the courses offered must ideally be one of the core factors for evaluating a B-school. As an illustration, DoMS, IIT Chennai offers courses like Systems Thinking and Applications, Project Management, Total Quality Management.
Is anybody looking at these factors at all?

Doctoral programmes
Barring a cursory allocation of some points for the availability or otherwise of a doctoral programme, no ranking ever looks at the quality and output. For example IIT, Madras graduates a little over one research scholar per faculty member per academic year; this is much larger in comparison to what many of our B-schools are doing now. Why is this not considered?

Students's performance
Students'; performance both during the programme, in terms of live projects, research outputs, business plans developed, entrepreneurial projects, as well as their performance at the enterprise levels after they graduate is also not in the consideration set for evaluating the performance of a B-school.

Alumni performance
A large proportion of our MBA alumni have earned company-wide ';best employee'; awards, honours or even promotions, sometimes even within the first year of their work! In short, our recruiters are indirectly informing us that the human resources we provide them are ';top class';. There has to be a mechanism to capture the value add a school imparts to its students, which is again woefully inadequately captured.

I would submit that rankings especially of top colleges must be done with slightly more care so that our people can justifiably and proudly believe that India is home to a few of the world's best academicians and institutions, and people will learn to take rankings in the 'right context'; and recognise well all the attendant noise and distortions.

This my plea: The press and media in India can be of great help to all the fine institutions that populate the country if the good work done by the dedicated and unassuming faculty, research scholars and students is presented in a well-deserved, positive light and accompanied by warm encouragement. We can then begin establishing India steadily as one of the world';s best destinations for higher education, an effort that we can ill-afford not to make.

More reports on B-School Rankings:

~ Careers360 methodology to rank B-Schools

~ Where most rankings go wrong

~ Top 100 B-schools, clusters for your consideration set