Photograph: Sarita Gupta Nigam

FINAL PLACEMENT: is the ultimate goal for any professional graduate especially MBA students. And any fudging here by institutes is dangerous

WITH the incredible rise in a number of management institutions in the country, MBA aspirants are often at crossroads, trying to figure out which institute to join. A key criterion to zero in on their admission decision is the placement record. 

Fudging is the name of the game
Since every B-school has its own system and schedule of campus recruitments, even its own definition of what constitutes campus placement, it is an all round mess out there. Some schools mention all the placements that happen to a co-hort even if it happens outside the campus as part of the campus data.

At the extreme, there are instances where institutes have resorted to paying placement consultants to come and recruit students from the campus and then declare the placement to be 100 percent, and because they turn out to be dud offers the student is left high and dry. 

What does the world do?
In the rest of the world (typically the USA) most of the top tier B-schools including Harvard, Wharton and MIT have realized the importance of standardisation of placement reports and adopted the standard reporting format (1999) under the aegis of the US-based MBA Career Services Council as “MBA CSC Standards for Reporting Employment Data”. This move has really helped in making the report more transparent, easy to comprehend, besides being more comparable and reliable while making decisions.

Is there hope  for Indian students?
In India, so far, students were left to fend for themselves when it came to placement data. They are forced to look up half-baked newspaper reports or go to chat forums on MBA. But the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A) has taken the lead and prepared a draft for the placements reporting standards known as the Indian Placement Reporting Standards (IPRS) Draft.

Details of salary component, location, function and sector-wise classification of jobs offered are part of the data. The lPRS will also have information on how many placements were arranged by B-Schools and how many were self arranged by students. 

Will more schools participate and adopt these standards? Can we hope that AICTE would make it mandatory?