India's Most Preferred B-schools!
In India's largest B-school Rankings initiative ever, as many as 5,410 people voted for the best B-schools all through November and December 2007 and here are the results! Browse through the results across various categories to gain amazing insights into what India thinks about Indian business schools.
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A year ago, when we conceptualized the idea of a crowdsourced ranking system - we did not realize that we would be working on weekdays, weekends and even on New Year’s Eve to complete the ranking initiative.
Having now spoken to enough people in the business schooling world, we have had a chance to hear and respond to various thoughts, concerns and even downright consternation. Going into the rankings, we had no doubt that we would be under a constant scanner and fairly so.
The first goal was to understand what we wanted to achieve – easier said than done, isn’t it? We at PaGaLGuY.com decided that we wanted to create a ranking of business schools “Of the people, by the people and for the people”. Lofty thought – but it laid clear our vision for a ranking. We wanted to let people know how everyone around them perceived business schools. The challenge was to find a simple but effective manner to capture and process this data.
We came up with an ingenious, but a deceptively simple way to capture this perception data and in the process ended up creating India’s largest ranking initiative. We would suggest you read up more on the methodology here – before coming back to read this article.
Now the rankings have been published and the insights gained from the rankings are yours to see and understand. We never claimed to come up with the definitive rankings of business schools – we would doubt anyone with a claim to do so – but we have arguably found a unique and scalable way to capture the thoughts of people and use it to rank business schools. In this ranking exercise we polled around 5,140 people. Now for the next year rankings, we believe our sample size would exceed higher 5 digit sample sizes and the more data we bring in, the more accurate the rankings – generated by you the people – turn out to be.
As we look back at the methodology, we see both potential and areas we could have done better in. We would like to share some of our thoughts so that we can get better feedback from you and evolve the ranking system so that it becomes more powerful, accurate and useful for you.
As we collected data and analyzed it, we noticed patterns amongst the data submitted. There were situations where people had tried to game the system to make for a quick profit (due to the GiftMate voucher which was offered at the end of the rankings) and in some cases to presumably help their alma-mater get a better ranking. What they did not realize was the extreme level of data scrubbing we put in before generating the rankings and this brought up a very interesting but inexcusable pattern – A set of business school students from a well known institute in South India decided to take the ranking just over 400 times to either profit from it or to help their business school in the ranking. We took necessary action and spoke to the students and the administration and even got the students to commit to a week of social service and returning back any of the proceeds from the gift voucher. Similarly we isolated many such patterns and through rigorous checking, we were able to remove everyone who we thought was trying to ‘game’ the system.
While certain people may have tried to ‘game’ the system – we were ready to take into account such situations and removed all their voting data to ensure that the rankings were again an accurate display of what people thought about business schools. We plan to introduce more checks and balances to ensure such indiscriminate behavior and may also black-list certain schools for a period of time incase we notice any such behavior amongst their students or alumni.
Thinking about the future - we believe that there is phenomenal information that can be captured that regular offline rankings may never be able to capture for two reasons – scale, ease of use and the medium. For the future versions of the rankings – we would like to be in a position to show you how schools in your city are ranked and compared across the city, state and the nation. We would like to show you how women perceive their favorite business schools to be. We would like to show you what recruiters in the energy/technology/retail/finance or any sector think their favorite school to hire is and heck; we would even like to show you how to do a wheelie on a bicycle – but then – you would have to work for us. Psst. Bring on the best recruiter rankings will ya!
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