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"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

- Benjamin Disraeli

So they did it again. Without fail, the biggest media exercise of ranking India's Best B-schools (after MBA Placements Coverage) appeared to the masses, surprised some (of the intended target) and made others yawn, and got dismissed in the process.

For an MBA school student / aspirant, these rankings represent a great moment, something akin to defining truth as these rankings tell the aspirant / student if they had made (or are going to make) the right choice in selecting one B-school over another, or not. It is also perceived that these rankings drive recruiters. Huh!!! (For the record, some able statisticians want us to believe that companies first look at ICFAI, Symbiosis before three of IIMs, XLRI Jamshedpur and JamnaLal Bajaj). But perceptions are perceptions, otherwise why would we call them perceptions in the first place.

As per one survey, MBA aspirants prefer Symbiosis over IIM Lucknow / IIM Indore / XLRI and JBIMS (unfortunately, IIM Kozhikode, which is rising like a phoenix amongst its contemporaries, failed to impress the surveyors and could not even make to Top-10). Does anybody know how many students left all these institutes to join the ones which have been ranked higher???

The sad part of this ranking business is that two very respectable business magazines, which have been carrying out these Best Indian B-schools Ranking stories for a long time now, still manage to mess it up time and again. In all honesty, they have been shuffling / re-structuring this ranking process without any success.

It looks like the great Indian B-school ranking tamasha is happening on two counts. The first is relying on the so-called marketing research firms to get an insight into Indian B-school rankings. Unfortunately, the MR (Market Research) companies have so far failed on this. Though their track record in other areas has been equally disastrous, e.g., one of the marketing research companies in question came out with a big surprise finding about complete rout of Narendra Modi in Gujarat and coming back of Congress. The magazine was so convinced about the survey that it featured a cover story on possible rout of Modi Government, only to be proved otherwise. Further, all these agencies, despite all their ability to crunch data, have no background in business schools research and, hence, have fumbled time and again. Its like 'using weighing scale to measure the height', as Ms. Rashmi Bansal (of Jammag.com) puts rightly in her blog.

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