Business School Rankings have earned a bad name in India for all the wrong reasons. It would have been great to be in an environment where methodologies of various rankings were pitted against each other in an intelligent debate spanning students, professors, recruiters and what have you. Instead, b-school rankings in India have lost credibility to the speculation that they could have the taint of advertising revenue.

In the midst of all this, we started our b-school rankings in the 2007-08 admission season. The PaGaLGuY B-school Rankings is in its third year now and we take special care within PaGaLGuY to keep it light years away from our business dealings with b-schools. For us, it is heartening to be appreciated by our readers as an ethically sound rankings.

With so much goodwill for our rankings, conducting the annual survey exercise for the rankings must be a breeze for us, you might say.

Sadly, not.

After the survey is over and we get down to analyzing the data, we come across the odd case who decides to answer the survey twice in the hopes that it might get his b-school one rank up. Identifying such responses makes our job a tad more tedious, but in most such cases we simply delete that extra response so that the sanctity of the survey remains intact.

But this article is really about the second category of riggers, to whom we show no mercy. This year, we uncovered strange voting patterns from two business schools showing complete disregard for the survey exercise.

The first b-school is Vinod Gupta School of Management (VGSoM), IIT Kharagpur. At least 10 students from this b-school created multiple fake IDs to answer the survey. One of them went to the extent of creating 14 such IDs, while the other nine used between six and two fake IDs. There is also evidence to suggest that some of them worked in collusion, since they had used similar email addresses while entering their demographic data.

The second school, International Management Institute (IMI), Delhi had at least five gentlemen who attempted to rig the rankings with three to six fake IDs each.

From the beginning, we were clear in our expicit disclaimers that those trying to rig the rankings may face action by way of disqualification of their b-school. We were not kidding.

As a result, we are disqualifying VGSoM, IIT Kharagpur and IMI, Delhi from the PaGaLGuY B-school Rankings 2010.

Efforts at our end have been earnest at giving the MBA community a sound, foolproof and clean rankings they could enhance their career decisions with. B-schools that do not respect this commitment and try to cheat to increase their rankings can be assured of appearing in the disqualification list such as this one.

Related post: How we arrived at the rankings + Methodology

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