As I join the dots between the motivations of students to join an MBA program and the exorbitant fees that they are expected to pay, I am made to believe that education is being traded like a commodity. People need a ladder to advance in their careers and they buy that ladder with money (fees). Now you might be wondering why I am suddenly discussing this. Well, it turns out that a few people who buy this commodity, or service (to be more precise) do not meet their ends. What I mean to say is that despite of paying sky-high fees and cracking extremely difficult entrance examinations, certain students fail.
Institutes like XLRI and IIM-L, fail students of their 2 year programs pretty regularly. And I fail to understand the logic of this exercise. Take for example XLRI; the college asks a student to repeat a year if the student fails to secure a passing grade in 6 credits. If this happens again, the student is summarily thrown out of the college. A similar system exists in IIM-L as well. There are several reasons I believe that this practice is not justified.
Firstly, a very practical issue in doing so is the very diversity in B-school student population that most B-schools run behind. As the proportion of students from unconventional backgrounds like music, fine arts, philosophy, various fields of entrepreneurship, etc. increases traditional, first year MBA courses start looking tailor-made to ensure their failure. For example, Quantitative Techniques. A typical Commerce student who had left mathematics in Class Xth or a trained Classical singer who took up Arts in Class XIth will have no way of knowing even the ABCD of this subject. And these students are expected to learn everything right from the basics of probability to probability distribution functions in a span of mere 30 teaching hours in 1 semester. And mind you, the typical semester will have at least 5 more equally unfamiliar subjects alongwith a plethora of student activities, placements, seminars, etc. How fair is it to these unsuspecting individuals from unrelated fields, that they are expected to ace a subject like this in the given circumstances? And more than that, how fair is it to fail a student because she did not know QT when she might be an ace in core marketing or finance subjects. Similar is the case with subjects like Operations’ Research and Information Systems. While really useful skills like using MS Excel and Power Point take a back seat in typical curriculum, students are regularly failed due to non-clearance of anodyne subjects whose utility is further challenged by software like SPSS, etc. As a provider of a service to a well-paying clientele, how right are these B-schools in this stance?
Secondly, we are talking about students at the post-graduate level here. It makes sense to fail school students since at that stage most children are not in a position to differentiate between what may lead to their good and what not. It is important, thus, to put across this point that some basic knowledge has to be gained for them to progress out of the education system. This is critical to ensure at least a basically aware society. But at the post graduate level where students are adults-mature enough to understand the repercussions of their actions, I fail to see the point. Also, the jobs in which these students will end up are not ones that require theoretical knowledge, rather ones that require on-the-job learning. This fact, clubbed with theoretical frameworks of teaching make failing students look like one big pompous sham.
The only reason that the proponents of failing students give is that they want to maintain the quality of their students. I completely agree that a basic level of quality must be maintained but I disagree with the parameters on which quality is being judged in this case. The purpose of B-school education is to make students job ready but any number of corporate honchos have gone on record saying that B-school students are anything but that. In such a case, the skills that are being imparted and consequently the standards on which the students are being judged are outdated and grossly erroneous. So the entire argument about maintaining standards falls flat on its face.
The need of the hour, in my opinion, is to restructure syllabi to make them intelligible to people from diverse backgrounds, reduce the number of subjects that students are bombarded with per semester so that some real learning takes place in a limited number of subjects and to introduce live projects as a part of courses to enhance on-the-job learning. It is a well-known fact that even the Modi wave has not been able to revive the job market to the point where hundreds of MBAs get jobs paying in the range of 17+ lakhs every year. In such a scenario, charging students this much, with the promise of a job and failing them mid-way does not sound like a great option. This is probably something that B-schools also need to think of; they need to learn that the focus should not be on failure or weeding students out, the focus should be on making them learn from their failure!
Comments
Ravi Chandra Kolluri
Is the Fee at XLRI around 19 Lakh rupees.............How can an aspirant from a modest family invest such huge amount where in you get less in return to what you paid ?? 36% of fee hike is really unlikely to happen... Can any one give the true figures
21 Aug 2014, 09.42 AM
Soumya Sarkar
It is indeed such exorbitant amount and thats why students or the future managers from these B schools are more worried about repaying their loans than about contributing new knowledge in managerial science
21 Aug 2014, 10.39 AM
Debasmita Das
Final Year PDGM Student @ IIM Lucknow
I totally disagree with your view. When you are investing so much, it is your responsibility to study and prepare well. No college authority is waiting to fail the students. Faculties are ready to help whenever required. But if the students are not responsible enough to invest time in studies, rather than spent time chilling with friends or partying; the college authority is not to be blamed!!!
21 Aug 2014, 12.49 PM
Abhishek Sharma
Working with an FMCG, MBA from IIM L. Foodie, gamer, traveler, bakar.
The phenomenon is reasonable. You might disagree more, once I will say that at IIM L, one needs to fail in just more than 2 credits to fail the year(it was one credit for the 2014 batch, getting D, minimum passing grade, in 5 courses also does the trick) :) That being said, one needs to put in effort to fail. The basic requirement to pass is just being regular, and not screwing up more than two of quizzes, projects, mid-term, end-term. I had screwed everything except my project in FRA, but had passed comfortably. CAT is fairer to engineers, but MBA is fair to all (in fact, commerce students have an edge - finance, economics, law). The quant of IIM is equally challenging for everyone, engineers hadn't studied significant amount of it before. Despite that, IIM L has a mandatory Quants remedial, before the course starts, for non-engineers and people with below 90%ile in sec-1 of CAT. Pass marks is 35-40 out of 100. After that, if someone fails then the college is not to be blamed; the person had some tragedy, mismanaged his priorities , or just got lucky in the entrance exam. We had a mandatory course on Excel in 1st year. Guess what, some failed even that. Corporate is dissatisfied with MBA grads (they are pretty satisfied with most of the graduates from the two colleges you are talking about), coz some irrational recruiters expect fresh graduates to be role-ready from the very first day, which graduates are not and no form of curriculum can make them. What the curriculum/B-School life does is, to transform the person into a hard-working and resilient person who is good at managing his resources (time, priorities, aspirations). The reasonable recruiters are happy with this, coz graduates are role-ready pretty soon due to the before mentioned traits. A person who can't survive the b-school curriculum, well you do the maths.
21 Aug 2014, 10.12 PM
Sharad Gupta
Associate Professor at Delhi School of Business
Disagree with the author. Any rational recruiter does not recruit any student from any top institute (like IIMs, XLRI, FMS, etc) primarily for the job skills that the article stresses on. Recruiters come to these colleges for finding students with traits of high learning ability, adapting to challenging situations and having high performance standards. Most recruiters go satisfied. The passed out student would have these traits either due to the strict admission process or due to adaptation in 2 years. Job skills for each function and domain can't be learnt during these 2 years. Moreover, job skills do not remain constant. These change every year and sometimes every 6 months so stressing on job skills may not be a great idea. But focusing on working (& passing each trimester) in highly challenging situation with high standards (& high competition) are sure ways of success in future corporate life. These are traits which each top B-school focuses on. If someone believes that one should not need to learn any thing after graduating from a top B-school, then it is a classic case of misplaced expectations.
30 May 2015, 11.32 AM