The two best things with an FMS GD and Interview are:

1. You get to know your results just a day after the last day of interview conducted by FMS.

2. You get to know the exact bifurcation of the marks you obtained in GD, Extempore and Interview.

FMS has one of the most transparent ways of selecting a candidate. 70% weight age is given to CAT score and the rest 30% to GD, Extempore and Interview. Extempore is actually a part of Interview where in the start, middle or end of the interview, you will be given a random topic to speak for 1 or 2 minutes. The topic might be contemporary, abstract or anything under the sun. E.g., my topic was to speak for 2 minutes on ‘Red Chair’. So, 20 out of 30 are taken care of in an interview and a good extempore can be savior for many souls. In fact, one can even make up for a poor GD in the interview. Many a times, the interviewers have been gracious enough to ask about not having spoken much in GD and if one can come up with a justified reason followed by some good points about GD topic, it might reverse the bad GD score.

No past academic sins, gender or academic diversity comes into play when it comes for selection. So, the game is pretty fair in FMS and surprisingly, FMS has been able to maintain the diversities pretty well even by not allotting grace marks for them. CAT score weight age is certainly a bit more and it might give an impression that the ones having a higher CAT percentile might end up getting there easily. However, the case is not so. CAT scores do not differ as much the CAT percentile makes it look like. If 283 is 99.0 percentile and 300 is 99.6 percentile, the difference in their FMS score is merely {(300-283)*70}/450 and this difference can be easily done away with a good performance in the rest 30 marks. I have seen many ones with their percentiles in late 99’s not making the list while the ones who were on the borderline of the shortlists made it to the red building of the dreams.

So, get ready for the next level as the CAT administrators will announce the things on XXth January and one can count upon their chances for an FMS call if the scores are 98.5+. This should be treated as a cut-off though. Historically, the cut-off in 2012 has declined from 98.83 to 98.56 and it has been only two years since FMS started taking admissions based on CAT. So, there is very less historical data to predict the FMS cut-off.