IIMs may hold interviews in same city

Nearly 2.4 lakh aspirants have applied for the Common Aptitude Test CAT,which will switch to a computer-based system this year.

The IIMs have agreed that in keeping with the ministrys view of decreasing the strain on students,interviews will be held in a single city on successive days. All attempts will be made to do so from this year on itself. The idea is that students appearing for CAT for admission to IIMs do not have to travel five or six times to different cities for interviews, a highly placed source said.

The IIMs opted for the plan after rejecting the idea of a common interview system. We conveyed to the HRD Ministry that an IIT-style integrated interview for admissions was not doable as there is hardly any commonality with the student profile called for interviews by the various IIMs. The IIT selection process is different from IIMs as admission is entirely rank based. At IIMs,admission is not based on CAT scores alone. Group discussions and personal interviews also decide the final admission, another source said.

The HRD Ministry had asked the IIMs to admit students through an integrated interview as recommended by the Bhargava Committee,set up by former HRD minister Arjun Singh last year.