This year's edition of the BT-MDRA B-School Ranking 2020 to rank the best programmes in business education has been prepared in association with research partner Marketing & Development Research Associates (MDRA).
The Objective questionnaire seeking latest and relevant information from the institutes on each parameter/ sub-parameter was put up on the websites of MDRA and Business Today, and more than 2,500 institutes were contacted through emails, telephonic calls and advertisements in the magazine. Despite most of the B-Schools being closed due to the lockdown, 293 of them submitted their responses within the timeline. One institute was excluded from the final ranking for not fulfilling the criteria.
A comprehensive list of B-Schools offering fulltime classroom management programme (PGDM/MBA), established at least five years ago with minimum three passed-out batches, was prepared. Four steps of data sorting, logical checks and validation, back-checks and audits were conducted. First, the details provided by the institutes were matched with information and data available with MDRA from previous editions of the study. Then, verification and audits of participating B-Schools were conducted by MDRA researchers. Since physical verification was not possible, the research team virtually visited 45 B-Schools to verify the authenticity of the data provided by the institutes. Some irregularities that came up during the audits were corrected in the final objective data. The scores of the five parameters of evaluation were then summed up to get the total objective score by each institute.
MDRA evaluated B-Schools based on current year's data on the basis of 127 attributes. The final rank to B-Schools were assigned based on objective data after cross-validation through multiple sources such as institutes' past data, colleges' websites, government data, international accreditation bodies, etc.
The MDRA core team was led by Abhishek Agrawal (Executive Director) and included Abnish Jha (Project Director), Rajan Chauhan (Sr. Research Executive), Preeti Kashyap (Asst. Research Executive) and Manveer Singh (Executive EDP).