Credit: Business Week MBA
I think I thought about this idea around the time that PagalGuy launched their B-school rankings, a couple of years back. I love their reasoning which was clearly detailed in this post by Apurv. I liked the fact that it was clearly stated that it was a perceptions-based ranking wherein all students who voted based on what their perception of which B-school was good. I also liked the basis on which they stated such a ranking was necessary i.e. given that many of these parameters were subjective or if objective, based on incomplete or incorrect data soon made such rating inaccurate. However, I had some concerns even on this kind of ranking:
1. A perception of a B-school is based on what a person has read about and experienced at a B-school. Most often than not, since Pagalguy does its best at maintaining a neutral stand and doesn’t lean for or against any particular B-school (except for one four-letter MBA school – IIP*), and let’s accept that the impression of a B-school is rarely based on participation on the forums (I could be wrong on this – it’s a subjective matter), the only “real” source of differentiating among B-schools is based on rankings by magazines like Outlook, BusinessWorld or Business Today. When you think about it, when an authority like a business magazine decides that one MBA school is better than the other, how many people are actually going to say a lower-ranked school is their first choice irrespective of how inaccurate those ratings may be or how badly those rankings have been manipulated? So what a perception based ranking really does is re-iterate and consolidate the rankings that magazines define over the past god-knows-how-many years. And that is clearly reflected even in the listing of B-schools by Pagalguy.
2. Another thing that bothered me was how this was to a significant extent biased towards schools with a larger student crowd. One comment (from a student of a B-school that was banned for trying to rig the system) actually reflects that concern clearly. Given that my alma mater was only 10 years old when I graduated from there and given, that my B-school had a relatively smaller student body, it was a clearly at a disadvantage in the ratings given the limited number of votes available to us in both the current students category and alumni category. So while, unlike other standard rating systems where the number of students was rarely a factor (rather than the much more popular faculty-to-student ratio), this typically irrelevant factor indirectly did feed the rating process.
3. A third concern was how, while for the first-time I saw some brilliant categorization of the results in terms of what was the perception of a particular B-school in terms of the profile of the person who cast the vote (woman, alumni, student, aspirant), the results could not clearly differentiate on two things: One was certain nuances e.g. For me placements was not important (since I had already locked in offers or atleast PPIs from two companies by the time my summers was complete) but rather the opportunities I was exposed to: IPR lectures from an ex-legal head of HLL, my final-year project in a couple of remote villages for ICT4D (Information and Communication Technology for Development), an opportunity to work with incubated start-ups, etc. Now, none of these courses or opportunities existed specifically within my B-school but was accessible because I was part of the IIT student body. How do you reflect this in a vote? In case of another aspirant looking for the same options, how would this ranking help him? What about specific subjects and criteria ? For example, IITs don’t admit non-engineering/ non-sciences undergraduates. HR is not a specialization in an IIT despite certain subjects being taught in specific semesters. So if I was a non-science graduate wanting to specialize in HR, how would the ratings change for me?
Obviously, I was still quite sure that this was a step in the right direction. One, it was probably never designed to answer these specific (although critical) questions. It was more of a reflection of what the whole student/alumni body perceived as good or bad B-schools in general, more of giving a flavor rather than the answer to a specific query. The second is this incredible trust that the MBA community has in PagalGuy (which is absolutely warranted) that the rating would be raw and untarnished- not manipulated in any specific way. What I also like is how PG has seriously ripped up the cost structure of a MBA ranking system 
. I assume the costs were more on the efforts and the monitoring than the actual cash spent, usually to travel across the country from B-school to B-school
But I was just wondering if there was a more integrative way to do this. Combine the depth and detail of a normal B-school rating process with the wisdom-of-the-crowd approach, if I may. What I realized is there was an even better way: Personalize it.
Let me try to explain what I’ m thinking.
Phase1: Think about your traditional MBA survey which contains criteria like student-to-faculty ratio, placement details, infrastructure (break this down into boolean or quantitative stuff like presence of an incubation centre, gym, central library, etc.) , faculty (break this down into no. of Ph.Ds, external faculty, etc.), etc. Include all these in your rating engine (Does the words “rating engine” hint at what I’m trying to specify?) These specific factors can be crowdsourced. Given that the ratings would be a digital one, you can incorporate as many factors as required even going up to 100 – 150 factors and break-ups. Finalize these factors biased towards what aspirants require.
Phase2: Now, based on these factors, we maintain the traditional concept of giving a score to each B-school on each of these factors. Now, we don’t rate one school over another. We just plug-in what the values are e.g. Gym: Central Library – Yes/ No. Placement figures: Rs. XX. No. of international placements: AA international placements. The absolute value is entered. While I agree with the fact that most of the CTC are usually fudged quite passionately , I would also say that given that most schools do that to approximately the same extent, it would not significantly change rankings unless it is the only factor or given a weightage over 80% – 85%.
Phase3: Personalize. And I think this is my killer point. Let each aspirant/ person choose his own weightage across parameters. Let it be a rating engine rather than just a consolidation of a survey. For example, if I think an incubation centre is important (since I would like to start my own thing), hence, making placements a lot less important, let me have that option. If I prefer external faculty to oldies stuck in the bureaucratic process, let me choose that. Marketing faculty over Finance. Alumni size over student size. Hell, typical MBA event budgets over number of clubs (like a Finance club, a marketing club, etc.) , MDPs over faculty qualification, Basically, give every individual 100 points and let them sprinkle it over the various parameters as they see fit. So my rating list is entirely different from someone else’s rating list. A million rating lists if I may.
Phase4: Publish. Let every person publish their personal ratings wherever possible. Maybe in their signature on forums. Maybe on their blog. On their Twitter feed. Or their Facebook pages. Everywhere. Even better, MBA colleges may manipulate those weightages to show them in the top 10 list for a specific combination of weights. They would publish that on their website, in their newspaper ads, etc. Provide each of these ratings with a permalink which people can reach directly. The risk of incorrect advertising would be to draw up a Terms and Conditions contract that specifically states that the weights used to arrive at that ranking should be published in any ad that contains the ranking details so that the exercise of getting the advertised list is replicable. It only draws more traffic to PagalGuy anyways, given that each ranking list would be on the Pagalguy domain. Even aspirants can advertise or broadcast to the world, what their specific criteria in a B-school are. Maybe the top-10 most common sets of criteria can be separately published to give a general idea of what B-school aspirants, alumni or women perceive as most important. Hell, while we’re all out of the box here, create a “Your choice of parameters for a b-school are similar to members XXX, YY and ZZ” concept (how can you have a community and a ranking without any social element in each product!)
I wonder where else such a system could work ? Politics? Reality shows ? Frankly, anywhere where voting works ?
