India’s premier public business school, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A) is opposing the new criteria of admission laid down by the government into the doctoral programme IIM offers, reports the Indian Express.

Last month, the Ministry of Human Resources Development (HRD) permitted all 20 IIMs to admit students who have four-year bachelors degrees into the PhD programme. Students need a minimum of eight CGPA or equivalent to be eligible to apply for the fixed four-year course.

For students who want to enrol in the three-year doctoral programme, applicants need either a master’s degree or a two-year PG diploma. Even students with professional qualification of CA/ICWA/CS alongside B.Com can apply.

This notification was brought in response to the clarifications sought by some IIMs, who instead of offering the Fellow Programme in Management (FPM), are empowered to award PhD degrees.

The Director of IIM-A, Erol D’Souza, says the new IIT Act is inconsistent with the practice followed by the public business school. “If we look at our admission record (for the doctoral programme) over the past decade, almost half of our students are engineers and roughly 60 per cent of them have had a CGPA of less than eight. The reason we don’t focus only on CGPA is because we also ask for a statement of purpose and conduct an hour-long personal interview. So it’s a holistic assessment of which CGPA is just one part,” he said.

Furthermore, D’Souza is objecting to the government's decision to not include one-year PG diploma offered by the IIMs as a criteria for eligibility. He questioned the government over not allowing students who have the one-year PG diploma, into the course. “Why change what has worked for us in the past?” he asks.

D’Souza has also requested the secretary of higher education, R Subramanyam, to amend the government notification.