SECOND year into the ranking and reviewing process of best institutions offering management education, Careers360 invited participation from 406 B-Schools. The shortlisting was done primarily by recognising last five years’ rankings conducted by four magazines (Business World, Business India, Business Today and Outlook) and also by identifying institutions that have emerged in the recent past.

Apart from directly approaching some of them, the identification exercise was aided by the All India Council of Technical Institutions (AICTE) database that also has mandatory disclosures (MD) for AICTE approved institutions.
 
The process was three-fold. Having sent the questionnaire to these institutions to seek information, we also divided the institutions into nine geographic clusters namely: North, East, West & Central, Delhi (including NCR), Mumbai, Pune (Maharashtra except Mumbai), Hyderabad (AP), Chennai (Tamil Nadu, Kerala) and Bangalore (Karnataka). Visits to select institutions were made in each of these clusters to know more about them in greater depth by experiencing firsthand the campus, the facilities, the resources, interface mechanisms etc. It was  also to look/verify the available data. We interacted with the head of institutions, faculty, staff and the students. Some 90 institutions sent us information.

The second part involved gathering information on select   institutions from annual reports, Mandatory Disclosures (if any), our visits to institutions last year, publicly available data on websites and also by filing Right to information (RTI) applications (read  article on page 61). In all we were able to gather robust information on 125 institutions and left out over 275 institutions for lack of data.
 
In the ranking process, we weeded out or normalised unsubstantiated claims made by some institutes by verifying them with data submitted to relevant authorities like AICTE, UGC and MHRD. Data found incommensurate with the supporting documents was suitably corrected. Each data set was normalised in relation to either the student body or with the core faculty. Data has been evaluated on the basis of our proprietary Input, Process and Output parameters with weights for its constituents as given in the table. This year we have given more information even on the sub-parameters so that the students and their guardians get a fair understanding of where the institutions stand and are able to take informed decision while  choosing a B-School.
 
THE INPUT-PROCESS-OUTPUT METHODOLOGY