This is the third year that Business Today and MDRA are bringing out the most exhaustive list of B-schools offering full-time management courses (PGDM/MBA), established at least five years ago and with at least three passed-out batches.
The second stage involved fine-tuning the objective questionnaire to get latest information from institutes on each parameter/sub-parameter. It was put on websites of MDRA and Business Today. More than 2,200 B-schools, fulfilling the criteria for participation, were informed and requested to participate through emails, telephonic calls and advertisements in the magazine. The deadline was clearly mentioned. In all, 277 institutes submitted their data within the timeline. Around 30 did not submit their data on time and, hence, were excluded from the process.
After getting the data, in the first stage, the details provided by the B-Schools were examined through available information and MDRA database. In the second stage, MDRA researchers conducted physical verification and audit to scrutinise the data. They visited close to 60 B-schools. In the last five years, the team has visited more than 350 campuses to verify the data/information provided by them with the help of original documents/infrastructure. Some irregularities that came up during the physical audits were corrected in the final objective data. The scores of the five parameters were then summed up to get the total objective score of each institute.
Like last year, MDRA evaluated B-schools based on current year data to give stakeholders more realistic, updated and accurate information. The final ranks were assigned based only on their objective data after various levels of cross-checking and data validation through sources such as institutes' past data, college websites, government data, data with international accreditation bodies, etc.
The MDRA core team was led by Abhishek Agrawal (Executive Director) and included Abnish Jha (Sr. Research Manager), Preeti Kashyap, Assistant Research Executive, and Vikas Chauhan (Sr. Research Executive). ~