Reserved category students chasing an IIM dream now have an incentive to dream big. To broaden the pool of applicants and enhance their competitive skills, the Indian Institute of Management-Lucknow has decided to help these students seek structured training for the Common Admission Test (CAT).
IIM-L felt that there was an urgent need to address the issue of improving representation and creating opportunities for socio-economically deprived students at IIMs. As per a roadmap, it was decided that in the pilot phase around 40-60 promising students (SC/ST category), who are amenable to management studies from colleges around Lucknow, would be selected.
The candidates would then be groomed and coached for two–three months by an external professional agency, which has expertise in training students for CAT-like exams. IIM-L would bear all the expenses as part of the Institute’s Corporate Social Responsibility initiative.
To be fair in the process, IIM-L will have no role in the selection and training of these candidates and would neither have any influence on any CAT-related process.
For CAT 2012, IIM-L has selected Team Satyam as its preferred vendor to select and prepare a batch of 50 SC/ST candidates taking the test and also groom these candidates for the next stage – the PG programme in management admission process.
{{/usCountry}}For CAT 2012, IIM-L has selected Team Satyam as its preferred vendor to select and prepare a batch of 50 SC/ST candidates taking the test and also groom these candidates for the next stage – the PG programme in management admission process.
{{/usCountry}}Other than this exercise, Team Satyam is in no way associated with IIM-L with regard to CAT 2012. This special exercise for SC/ST candidates in no way ensures their admission to the PG programme in management of any IIM or to any other programme of any business school that accepts the CAT score. Devi Singh, director, IIM Lucknow said this exercise would help all the IIMs to get quality students from the socio-economically deprived categories. It would also be an incentive for brilliant students from these categories to dream big, focus their energies in a constructive manner for socio-economic uplift. Initially, this project would be restricted to the Lucknow region (but the candidates can be from any where in India) for the purpose of easy monitoring and evaluation. Based on the results and feedback, the same could be extended to other cities across India next year.