The IITs’ (Indian Institutes of Technology) loss is GMAT’s (Graduate Management Aptitude Test) gain. With the canning of the Joint Management Entrance Exam (JMET), regulatory body All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has added the GMAT to the six acceptable entrance tests for admissions to the Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) offered at AICTE-approved b-schools.

In its approval guidelines for the academic year 2012-13, the AICTE has stipulated that institutes offering Post Graduate Diploma in Management shall admit students who have valid score of CAT, MAT, XAT, ATMA, GMAT and CMAT.

The guideline comes as a sigh of relief to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which owns the GMAT exam and had even invested in an India office at Gurgaon to convince more Indian b-schools to sign up to accept the GMAT.

However in a circular issued in December 2010, the AICTE had kicked off a controversy by limiting the number of management entrance tests that AICTE-affiliated b-schools could use for admissions to just two. Following a court battle, b-schools were granted interim relief by being allowed to use any one of the five entrance tests from the CAT, MAT, XAT, ATMA and JMET.

“We had at that time made a representation to the AICTE explaining that the GMAT was a globally accepted 50-year-old test and taken by 22,000 candidates within India itself. We had requested the AICTE that they consider our case for inclusion into the list of allowable tests for approved b-schools,” Ashish Bhardwaj, GMAC’s Regional Director of South Asia told PaGaLGuY.

Following JMET’s cancellation, the AICTE decided to accept GMAC’s representation to replace the JMET with the GMAT, he added.

The go-ahead will now help GMAT approach Indian b-schools with more legitimacy. “Earlier when we were going to top b-schools and persuading them to also use the GMAT, they used to ask how they could use the GMAT when it wasn’t approved by the regulator,” said Mr Bhardwaj.

“However now we can say that since the regulator has accepted us, the b-schools should have no problem in associating with the GMAT,” he added.

The GMAT is currently accepted by 5,200 MBA or equivalent programmes across the world, of which 132 spread across 50-odd b-schools are in India. In the immediate past, IMT Ghaziabad, MICA, TAPMI Manipal and MDI Gurgaon have been the latest b-schools to start accepting the GMAT.

However in India, the test is primarily used for admissions to one-year executive programmes such as those at the Indian Institutes of Management at Ahmedabad, Calcutta and Bangalore and at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.

Several two-year MBA programmes also accept the GMAT, but primarily as a strategy to target foreign nationals or prospective students coming from the Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) or Non-Resident Indian (NRI) category. The test is rarely taken by resident Indians to apply to flagship two-year programmes.