text: IIMs plan to attract non-engg students | kolkata | Hindustan Times
  IIMs plan to attract non-engg students
  IIM chiefs are planning to change the pattern of the common admission test to reduce the number of engineering graduates in the their classrooms, besides changing the gender ratio to bring in more girl students.
  kolkata Updated: Nov 15, 2010 23:03 IST
  The IIMs are also targeting more students from the humanities, medicine, law, agriculture and commerce streams.
  Addressing the IIM directors' conclave at IIM Calcutta (IIM-C) to celebrate the institute's golden jubilee year on Monday, IIM-C director Shekhar Chaudhuri said, "Most of the IIMs have only about 10% girl students."
  While IIM-Ranchi has just one girl student this year, IIM-Kozhikode and IIM-Bangalore bucked the trend by admitting 30% and 20% girl students respectively. The rest of the eight IIMs have not been able to breach the 14% mark.
  Chaudhuri said, "The B-schools that do not take students through the CAT have about 40% girl students. We need to change the way CAT is conducted to usher in a healthy gender ratio."
  "CAT is an efficiency driven exam and gives emphasis on quantitative aptitude, and hence the IIMs mostly have students from engineering," said N Ravichandran, director of IIM Indore.
  But Devi Singh, director of IIM Lucknow, said, "We are tired of explaining to our governors why do we have so many engineers in a batch."
  Also the fact that most IIMs have about 90% students from engineering also meant that the classrooms lacked diversity.
  He said, "To address this, we changed our admission criteria, but that did not work well. Now we feel we need to change the way CAT is conducted."