How We Did It

As in previous years, we partnered with leading market research firm Marketing & Development Research Associates (MDRA) to conduct a ranking of India's business schools. A comprehensive list of B-schools offering full time management courses (PGDM/MBA), established at least five years ago with minimum three passed-out batches, was updated.

The objective questionnaire was fine-tuned to obtain the latest and most relevant information from the institutes on each parameter or sub-parameter and was put on websites of MDRA and Business Today. More than 2,300 B-schools that met the qualification criteria were informed and requested to participate in the objective survey, through emails, telephonic calls and advertisements in the magazine, within the mentioned deadline.

In all, 305 institutes across the country submitted their objective data within the timeline and were considered for ranking. Two institutes that did not fulfil the criteria were excluded from the final ranking table.

In the first stage, after receiving the objective data, all details provided by the B-schools were carefully examined through information and database available with MDRA. At the second stage, physical verification and audit of participating B-schools was conducted by MDRA researchers to scrutinise the data submitted.

The researchers visited as many as 60 B-schools to verify the authenticity of the data provided by the institutes. During the past five years, MDRA research team has visited more than 400 campuses for verification of information.

The research team cross checked the given data with the original documents and available infrastructure. Some irregularities that came up during the physical audits were corrected in the final objective data. Scores on the five evaluation parameters were then summed up to get the total objective score of each institute.

Like last year, MDRA has collected and evaluated B-schools based on current year data to give stakeholders a more realistic, updated and accurate information about B-schools. The final ranks were assigned based only on the B-schools' objective data after various levels of cross-checks and data validation through multiple sources such as institutes' past data, colleges' websites, government data, international accreditation bodies, etc.