With more toppers, road to top B-schools gets tougher

Zubin Malhotra

The Common Admission Test or CAT is an annual pilgrimage that lakhs of students undertake every year with starry dreams in their eyes of corporate careers and mind-boggling salaries. The journey is arduous, the contenders are numerous and the slippery CAT is known to through a surprise every now and then to keep the pilgrim honest. 

The CAT is, after all, the pathway to entering the hallowed portals of the leading B-schools in India. A huge industry has established around it — from preparing the young hopefuls, to analysing its every question, every little change in nuance and trend threadbare, to the reams of (offline and online) analysis of the test itself and then most crucially the results. 

The result of CAT 2016 released recently brought some key factors tht students preparing for CAT 2017 should keep in mind. These are: 

Toppers on the rise

CAT 2016 saw 20 candidates ‘bell the CAT’ with a 100 percentile score.

There were eight 100 percentilers in 2013, 16 in 2014, and 17 in 2015. While the larger number of perfect scores from a larger number of applicants in itself is of little significance, what is crucial to note is the likely increase in the final admission cut-offs. Yes, there are other factors — academic scores in school and college, performance in WAT/GD (Written Analysis/Group Discussion) and Interview, work experience — that contribute to the final selection. 

B-school Admission cut-offs to rise 

Most of the IIMs have already announced their cut-offs for the second round of selection. While these range between 80-90 percentile for the general category at the top IIMs (with sectional cut-offs specified as well), expect the general trend in the improvement in CAT scores at the top-end to push admission call cut-offs higher than previous years. With the increase in seats essentially limited to the ‘baby’ IIMs, admission to the older established IIMs is set to get tougher.

Engineers continue to rule

All 20 of the toppers are from engineering backgrounds. In 2015, only one of the toppers was a non-engineer. 

So, no surprises here about engineers acing the CAT.

The CAT exam is quant heavy with 2 out of 3 sections being numerical/maths based — Data Interpretation & Logical Reason, and Quantitative Ability. This certainly gives an edge to engineering students in the written stage.

What about the Girls?

Girls regularly out-perform in most Class X and XII Board exams and even in college exams. And while they do about as well as boys in medical and civil services entrance exams, this doesn’t quite hold true when it comes to the CAT.

Results from 2014 and 2015 both had 1 girl each among the toppers, whereas the 2016 toppers group is an exclusive male club. 

What explains this gender performance gap? Is it that fewer girls are interested in Management as a career? Is there a (gasp!) male-bias in the CAT exam? 

Let’s look at some data points first

• As per the press release of the CAT 2016 results, several girls did score 100 percentile in different sections of the exam.
• In absolute terms, the number of women applicants in 2016 rose by 1% comprising approx one-third of total applicants. That's about 77,000 compared to 70,000 in 2015. 
• CAT 2016 applicants rose to a 7-year high of 2.32 lakhs. This was as increase of nearly 14,000 over the CAT 2015 applications. Nearly 50% of the increased applicants were women. 

Women are clearly doing well on the CAT exam. They are applying in increasing numbers. Since there are far fewer women taking the exam, fewer are topping it. Do remember the percentile score is relative to the number of candidates appearing and not the actual marks scored. 

A similar pattern is observed in IIT entrances where more and more girls are choosing Engineering /Tech courses and are also making it to the IITs; however relatively few make it to the top-100 list. Given the engineering-skew in those cracking the CAT, the lower proportion of women engineers is bound to have a follow-on effect on the CAT performance.

Historically, CAT has been dominated by GEMs (Graduate Engineers Males), and thus B-school classrooms. Typically, non-engineers would comprise no more than 10 per cent of a top-10 B-school’s incoming class. 

Let’s also not forget that girls in engineering programmes would be in the low double-digit percentages. If we use the JEE-Advanced rank-holders data as a proxy for the gender ratio at engineering it is 1 girl for every 7 boys or 12.5 per cent. Of the total 36,566 rank holders in 2016 JEE-Advanced, 31,996 were male and 4,570 were female.

Even a decade ago the percentage of women at B-schools would be in single-digits. Over the past 2-3 years, women comprise about 20 per cent of the intake across all the IIMs put together.

B-schools — IIMs in particular — have been trying to somewhat balance this disparity by encouraging more women to apply. To reduce the male and engineering dominance, several B-schools, including IIMs, offer additional weightage (points) for women and non-engineering applicants in the short-listing of candidates called for the interview round. What this means is that they still have to clear the final round on their own steam.

— The writer is Career Coach, Career Guidance India, New Delhi