Welcome to the PaGaLGuY.com B-school Rankings survey! We have built an extremely fast, easy and effective way to rate the top Indian business schools. The ranking system is designed to become more accurate as more users submit their individual thoughts on business schools.
All we ask you is to compare each b-school with every other b-school based on your perception (it will take you just over two minutes). We are gathering the data in a scientific fashion which we will analyze to come up with the rankings of business schools in India. (Click here for a detailed description of our methodology).
You now have the power to decide the rankings of business schools. This will be the rankings of the people, by the people and for the people.
Now thats a gr8 move by PG. However the robustness and validity of the methodology adopted is questionable.
Perception Based Rankings ? Now thts called adding fuel to fire - how do these perceptions form in the first place ? Yes u got it right - Perceptions are mostly just perceptions - half baked truths which lead to more perceptions and something called the Bullwhip effect !
The good news however is that One can TRUST PG RANKINGS ! Unlike the business of b-school rankings some of the Business Magazines have made of - PG rankings would surely be fair, straight from the horse's mouth and clean
What purpose such ranking would achieve is beyong my understanding though. Coz if im an aspirant and i wanna know if XYZ institute is good and what its standing is - id like to go beyond perceptions and delve into its truths - like wht are the actual quality of placements, infrastructure, students etc
PG has been always very relevant and useful to the students and asipirants. So such a ranking methodology would help its future members in making thier decison of choosing the right MBA institute?
It seems to be maddness , but there must be Method behind the maddness. PG surely must have solid research behind such a ranking methodology. Atleast Hopefully !
8 comments:
Extremely Insightful I must say..What were those PG guys were thinking..may be a marketing gimmick I suppose..still I really like this line from the post "how do these perceptions form in the first place"...thats true my friend..it will serve nothing but fuel to the fire of already existing B-School ranking fiasco...
Kudos to you
"id like to go beyond perceptions and delve into its truths - like wht are the actual quality of placements, infrastructure, students etc"
Firstly, thanks for a good critique of the PG Rankings. Appreciate it :). Now...
1. Placements data shared by B-schools across the spectrum is rigged and inflated. How can you construct a second layer of lies over another? How can such a rankings be credible at all, even if the agency doing the rankings is honest?
2. Infrastructure: fallacious. "Our library has X thousand journals and Y thousand online articles." How many MBA students actually read them? Indian b-school education is at times sorry farce of plagiarism, Google aggregated project work, cheating during exams (even in the IIMs), etc. You know the truth. Besides that, every school has the same infrastructure, wi-fi, etc etc. How do you compare infrastructure? By the quality of cement used in the construction?
3. Quality of students: again, how do you measure it? Past academics? ICFAI will lose badly there. But then again, I see you call yourself an entrepreneur and some of the top b-schools have the most risk-averse people in the country. Subjectively speaking, I would rate you higher in terms of 'student quality'. It's all so debatable.
When you attempt to do rankings via hard facts, you uncover ten holes in the process of covering one. We did not want to do a farcical rankings or conform to existing statistical models just for the heck of it. We want to call a spade a spade.
Lastly, I would like to point out one line from the Rankings methodology page which you clearly did not read:
"What will the PaGaLGuY B-school Rankings indicate?
They will simply indicate what India thinks about its Business Schools.
Are they the most definitive rankings of Indian Business Schools? No. Should they be used to select the b-school of one's choice? To a certain extent. Are they an indicator of the brand image of a business school in the market at large? Yes."
You are assuming that our rankings seek to serve the same purpose as the magazine rankings. The truth is they don't and we have maintained that from day 1.
- Apurv
Hi Apurv,
first of all thnks for taking out time to reply ! it means a lot of encouragment. Dont get me wrong - there is no bigger PG fanatic than me ;-)
while ur point is right too - but in that case there should be no b school rankings at all? if u mean that rankings based on fact is not possibly fair and true ?
one can look at how the same is done officially in USA - thy have official rankings and am sure we can adopt and learn from thier methodologies.
nothing wrong with perception ranking per se - bt then whts the use of it to aspirants ? i woudnt like to encourage trend of CHOOSING B SCHOOLS BASED ON PERCEPTIONS.
its not about ICFAI or XYZ - its just abt the direction.
asitis MBA in india is shrouded by lack of transperancy, such perceptions make things worse
its just my personal views . as i mentioned im sure PG must have done solid research before adopting such a ranking ! im no expert to decide if its relevant or not ! its just that it woudnt me relevant for me :-)
thnks again
regards
abhishek
Abhishek,
B-school rankings in the West are equally trashed and criticized in public as they are in India, in fact more. I leave all that to you to learn about and research for your own knowledge add. Just because it's the West, doesn't mean it's perfect or better. They have their own set of problems.
Here are a few points...
1. People judge b-school rankings by 'reverse engineering method'. If the output of the rankings matches the rankings in their mind, it's a good ranking. If it doesn't, it is rigged. Don't we as aspirants always find ourselves shocked to see certain schools in the top 10 and then proceed to trash the basis of the rankings? Every informed aspirant has a pre-decided rankings in his mind and any external rankings should match what is in his mind for it to be accepted. If it doesn't match, the aspirant will ignore it and consult his friends in b-schools, industry, friends etc while making a final decision. The moral of the story - perception has always been used as the overriding decision making factor... since the history of time.
2. We believe that it is very very tough, if not impossible to rate b-schools based on hard data. Just like you cannot measure the vital-statistics of a cricketer and predict his performance in the next triangular series. Marginal quality in b-schools is a result of a lot of SUBJECTIVE factors that cannot be captured as hard data.
3. Having said that, the SUBJECTIVE part can be best captured by perception. As I argued in (1), people eventually make their final decisions majorly by asking others for advice... perception in short. So the PG Rankings aren't doing anything new or radical by using perceptions. We are just capturing those perceptions for the benefit of everyone... aspirants, the industry, recruiters. Based on that, many conclusions can be drawn depending on the objective.
Cheers,
Apurv
Apurv,
I agree to disagree to your point.
We both are correct - just that im looking at the problem and u guys came up with a solutions oriented approach. hmmm.... So i should also start looking at solutions rather than harping on problems :-)
Perception based rankings is one of the way, though not the best of ways. if hard facts cant make a good ranking - then fine blend it with subset of perception based questions...that could be a mid way out - a solution ?
i somehow feel this perception based ranking is a easier way out to the challenge of bringing an authoritative b school ranking....But yeah no1 could have done it better than PG thnks to its existing user base and networking .
Abhishek,
I respect your opinion. For the record, I would like to clarify,
i somehow feel this perception based ranking is a easier way out to the challenge of bringing an authoritative b school ranking....
That's an assumption, because we never said we are bringing out the authoritative b-school ranking. In fact we don't think there is any such thing as the authoritative list of best b-schools in descending order. Such a creature doesn't exist!
Cheers,
Apurv
thnks for that Apurv, i respect and value ur views on this too
Yeah its an assumption....rather id say an Expectation As a PG oldie fan? id promote this ranking to all i know - and id like it to be Authoritative :-)
Well yes, with such following, resposibility and expectations follows.
Pg shoudnt have encouraged the Perception tren in India - asitis MBA in India is full of just Perceptions
Well again thats my take on this.Not that the world works the way i think it should :-)
Thnks for your visit , and hopefully my intentions werent mistaken. I may be liberal with my use of words- both good and bad - but im a true PG loyalist forever ;-)
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