(Photo credit: IMI Delhi by Ayan Banerjee)

Starting the 2012 batch, winning in b-school competitions and doing social work will matter for Post Graduate Dilpoma in Management (PGDM) students of International Management Institute (IMI) — Delhi, because the institute will grade them for it.

Called the Balanced Scorecard, the new system of internal evaluation of the PGDM students will add three optional new components to their performance measure besides the existing academic term scores. The institute hopes that it will help recruiters compare the social initiative and extracurricular feats of students using a uniform benchmark at the time of placements.

These days we get specific demands from corporate recruiters that they want to hire MBA graduates who will bring more than just academic learning to their companies. They want to hire someone who also has a well-built personality and will help them build their organisation better, Dr Himadri Das, Dean of Academics told PaGaLGuY.

The institute will hand out three additional scorecards which will each grade students for their ‘institution-building’ efforts, participation in extracurricular activities and the drive to work on social projects with Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs). A fifth transcript will declare the weighted average of the four individual scorecards.

The Institute had run a pilot of the concept with the 2011-13 batch and hoped to make it fully operational with the 2012-14 incoming batch.

The institution-building component of the Balanced Scorecard will measure active participation and contribution from the students in organization of events, building alumni relations, brand building of the institute and placements. Student communities will be responsible for these aspects. The idea is to help instil a sense of responsibility in students and help them understand how to deal with real life situations in a much better manner, said Dr Das.

The second component will evaluate a student’s performance in extracurricular activities by classifying various b-school events by their rigour. For example, a really tough competition organised by a premier b-school shall be graded ‘A’ and so on. Until today the college had been happy with our students merely participating in various events. However, the emphasis now will be on students winning in the events they choose to participate in. Grading in this section will be on the basis of the number of winning trophies a student claims. explained Dr Das.

The third addition to the official transcripts would evaluate the involvement of students in the social development sector. “We are planning to run this initiative along with NGOs in Delhi. Students will be expected to work along with the NGO and will be graded accordingly, said Dr Das.

On being asked how the college will handle students gathering certificates without doing actual social work, Dr Das said that since a b-school may not be equipped to grade students for the quality of their efforts in an NGO, We may ask the NGOs to grade the students for this transcript since they will be the ones who have actually observed the students perform.”

The concept of the balanced score card has already got faculty buy-in and student buy-in. Now the institute is trying to fix up the details of the process and various weightages. We have already introduced the concept among the 2011-13 batch. We will have a year to smooth out all the ripples that the concept brings and will make it fully functional by next year, Dr Das said.

The new components of the scorecard will however be optional. “The final MBA degree will still be awarded based on the students academic performance alone. Thus, even though the Institute will be handing out all the transcripts under the Balanced Scorecard concept to all the students, the ultimate choice of using them while applying to companies will rest with the students. If students choose not to participate in non-academic activities, we shall award them a zero on the additional transcripts. However, this will not affect their final MBA degree in any way,” explained Dr Das.