The Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), University of Delhi declared its interview and group discussion shortlist for admissions to the two-year fulltime MBA class of 2012-14 this evening. While the cut-off for the General category has been pegged at 98.73 percentile in the Common Admission Test (CAT), for the OBC category it is 85.80. The cut-offs in the SC and ST category are 78.18 and 53.78 percentile respectively. For the physically handicapped candidates, the cut-off is 75.15 and in the CW category, the cut-off is 64.25 percentile.

View the FMS Delhi shortlist here

This year, about 2,517 candidates have called for the interview, which will be held between April 21 and 27, 2012. The final selection process will be held at the FMS North campus.

FMS has called 1,230 aspirants for 101 seats in the general category, 651 in the OBC category for 54 seats, 363 in the scheduled caste category for 30 seats and 188 candidates for 15 seats in the scheduled tribe category. In the physically handicapped category, the institute has called 44 students and in the children/widow/wives of officers and men of armed force category, it has invited 41 candidates. Seats for PH, CW and FS are supernumerary as per the University of Delhi rules.

This is the first time that FMS has selected candidates based on the Common Admission Test (CAT) scores. According to a senior official at FMS, the ‘early declaration’ of the shortlist will give aspirants about a months time to prepare for the interviews. The dates have been chosen keeping in mind that the last semester exam of the current FMS batch will finish a little before the interviews start and so faculty members will be free of all internal exam-related responsibilities. Moreover, it would be easier to accommodate the huge number of aspirants in April-end, by when most of the current batch of students would have left the campus.

One of the reasons why a larger shortlist has been put up this year is because according to a Supreme Court verdict, the seats reserved for the Other Backward Classes cannot be converted to the General category seats if OBC candidates are available on the merit list. Hence, a larger number of candidates have been called, both from the general as well as the OBC categories. Last year, the school had called 1,043, less than half of this year’s candidates for interview.