AICTE’s Common Management Admission Test, popularly known as CMAT, has been attracting the masses ala a Salman Khan movie despite being low on substance. But if you are targeting premier B-schools, pause and think for CMAT has not been favoured by top institutes. SP Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai, initially said it will consider CMAT score but seems to have reversed the decision now. Some of the top B-schools that accept CMAT are Mudra Institute of Communication, Ahmedabad, Xavier Labour Relations Institute, Jamshedpur; Prin LN Welingkar School of Management, Mumbai; TA Pai Management Institute, Manipal; KJ Somaiya Institute of Managent Studies and Research, Mumbai; and Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai. “It is a bad bargain. You are eligible to apply to these schools via your CAT score,” says Arul Murugan, an MBA aspirant.
Industry opinion is that CMAT is too soft on the candidates. The difficulty level of the exam pales before the challenging CAT and is used by Tier II and III institutes to lure students to their institutes, which at the end of the day don’t offer your money’s worth.
Some institutes don’t want to mess with the process they are already following and are sticking to CAT. Says Lubna Nafees, chairperson, corporate communications and media relations, Institute of Management Technology-Ghaziabad, “While it’s true that we are willing to consider CMAT for our relatively new campuses of Hyderabad and Nagpur, for our parent institute we are still going ahead with filtering students based on CAT scores. We don’t wish to debate whether CMAT or CAT is superior. This is the process we had been following and it works well for us.”
National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai, and Management Development Institute, Gurgaon, are still pondering on whether to give a green signal to CMAT or not.
— shilpa.vasudevan@newindianexpress.com