IIMC announces cutoff for admissions

KOLKATA: Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIMC) has announced its minimum acceptable cut-off scores in the CAT 2007 bulletin to maintain minimum standards The cut-off applies even to reserved categories. With this, IIMC has followed IIM Ahmedabad (IIMA)'s last year's initiative of announcing the minimum cut-off for each section and overall score. IIMC's admissions-in-charge Prof Ashish Bhattacharya told ET, "This move has been taken to introduce more transparency into the admission process. Aspirants need to get at least this much in CAT to pass the courses at IIMC and handle the academic rigour."

The IIMC section in the CAT 2007 bulletin reads, "A candidate (including a reserved category candidate) to be shortlisted for GD and PI for admission to post-graduate programmes should obtain a minimum of 20%, 20% and 10% in 'quantitative', 'logic and data interpretation' and 'verbal' sections, respectively." The bulletin goes on to say: "The actual cut-off used for short-listing, however, may be higher than the minimum cut-off and would depend upon the performance of candidates in CAT 2007. Cut-off may be different for different categories (eg General, SC, ST and PWD) of candidates."

While cut-offs always existed internally, sources say that this year it has been stated upfront to safeguard, to an extent, against compromised quality students in case the OBC quota is finally implemented by the MHRD. Incidentally, IIMA has placed its CAT cut-offs higher, with a minimum of 25% in each section, and 33% on the aggregate. For shortlisting SC/ST/PWD candidates for GD/PI, it is a minimum of 17% in each of the three sections and 25% on the aggregate.