HOW THE B-SCHOOLS WERE RANKED
TThe 2022 India Today Group survey of the country’s business schools was conducted by Delhi-based market research firm Marketing & Development Research Associates (MDRA). Starting in 2013, the ranking, now in its 10th edition, has witnessed significant improvements in terms of the number of data points it considers. However, the fundamentals remain the same—providing the most credible and exhaustive rankings of India’s B-schools based on the latest data.
Institutes offering full-time classroom management programmes (PGDM/ MBA), established at least five years ago and with a minimum of three graduated batches till the academic year ending 2022, were considered for the rankings. The list has been prepared taking into account all aspects of management education. There are five main criteria for the rankings: learning experience, living experience, selection process, placement performance and future orientation.
In order to give stakeholders more realistic and accurate information, an objective questionnaire was prepared for the institutes to obtain the latest information—data from the current year—on 127 attributes. More than 2,500 B-schools across India, fulfilling the qualification criteria for participation, were contacted, and 283 of them responded within the deadline. Two entries were not considered as they failed to meet the eligibility criteria.
After receiving the objective data, four processes—data cleaning logical checks, validation, back-checks and audits— were initiated. At the first stage, every aspect of the details provided by the B-schools was carefully examined through the given information and the database available with the MDRA. At the next stage, verification and audits of the B-schools were conducted by MDRA researchers to ensure that the data submitted is accurate. The research team visited nearly 15 per cent of the participating B-schools to verify the authenticity of the data. Over the past 10 years, MDRA researchers have visited around 600 campuses to verify information provided by institutes. After cross-checking the data with the original documents/ infrastructure, some irregularities were corrected. The scores of the five parameters were then summed up to get each institute’s total objective score.
Final ranks were assigned to the participating B-schools based on objective data after various levels of cross-validation. A large team comprising researchers, statisticians, econometricians and analysts worked on this project from April 2022 to September 2022.
The MDRA core team was led by Executive Director Abhishek Agrawal and comprised Abnish Jha (Project Director), Vaibhav Gupta (Assistant Research Manager), Aditya Srivastava (Assistant Research Executive), Roshni Satwani (Assistant Research Executive) and Manveer Singh (Senior Executive EDP). ■