Unhappy with the quality of students, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B), has decided to allow students from other avenues entry into the B-school. CAT will no longer be the sole entrance test to determine doctoral students. This year, IIM-B has just eight doctoral students. Starting 2006, it will admit students who have given their Graduate Record Exam (GRE), Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) and Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) for its Fellow Programme in Management. The move is to combat the acute shortage of candidates who qualify for admission for FPM, which is an equivalent to a PhD by traditional universities. Though IIM-B offers FPM in eight areas, there is not a single student in Production and Operations Management and Marketing programme. We have been getting about 500 applicants every year and the final number of students who qualify is too low. Though we accept GMAT scores for NRI and foreign students practically no one has ever qualified through this. We decided to open up other channels because we will get more qualified students, L Prasad chairperson (FPM), IIM-B said. Prasad feels there will be more choice for IIM-B to choose the right candidate. This year there was only one student who applied for production. If we go beyond CAT, we hope to get quality students from IISc and IITs. For instance, we may get good students with economics background who wants to do public policy by opening up GRE stream. GATE will give us good engineering students, said Prasad. The FPM admissions committee will shortlist applicants and send it to eight areas offering doctoral programmes. Each area headed by a specialist with three to four faculty as members will decide the final number of students. The role of the admissions team is just to shortlist candidates. It is then left to the concerned area to select candidates, said Prasad

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