PaGaLGuY.com launches India’s Largest B-school Rankings initiative based on ‘Crowdsourcing'

Media News

Mumbai, November 23, 2007

PaGaLGuY.com, India's largest online MBA community launched India's largest Business School Rankings initiative on Sunday. This project (Link- http://rankings.pagalguy.com/ ) that reins in the public wisdom to accurately reflect what India thinks about Indian business schools, responds to a growing need of both MBA aspirants and recruiters for a credible rating of b-schools. Based on the innovative concept of 'crowdsourcing', the PaGaLGuY.com B-school Rankings project was devised as a fast and accurate way that enables its 158,000 strong registered user-base to compare 76 b-schools amongst each other based on their perception.

The phrase, “Of the people, By the people and For the people” captures the essence of this people-driven system which eliminates any possibilities of a bias.

The PaGaLGuY.com B-schools Rankings survey may be taken online by MBA aspirants, students, recruiters, academicians and other MBA stakeholders. With each respondent who submits his individual thoughts on business schools, the ranking system becomes increasingly accurate. The rankings survey can be accesses at the link - http://rankings.pagalguy.com/

How do the PaGaLGuY.com B-school Rankings work?

The PaGaLGuY.com B-school Rankings survey takes 76 Indian b-schools and compares each one of them with every other. Mathematically, this would involve a total of 2,850 comparisons, which is impossible for one single respondent to answer. Therefore, the system breaks down the questions into 57 sets of 50 (since 50 x 57 = 2,850) questions to be answered by the respondents. The comparison of b-schools with each other thus gets “crowd-sourced”. The more the number of responses, the more accurate the rankings become. Since respondents cannot know which random set of b-schools they will get to compare in this questionnaire, it is virtually impossible to influence the rankings by intention. Within 24 hours of its release, the respondents have made over 55,000 comparisons and we expect the number to grow exponentially higher enabling very high accuracy and precision in analysis.

The PaGaLGuY.com B-school Rankings is a powerful tool that will yield strong indicators of the brand image of various business schools in India. With traffic of over 2 lakh users each month on PaGaLGuY.com, this is expected to be the biggest b-school survey ever conducted in India.

The survey has already attracted widespread attention among the MBA community.

Harsha Shettigar, a CAT 2007 aspirant, working as a software engineer at ITC Infotech said, “I have always found b-school rankings published by various magazines ambiguous and biased even. The PaGaLGuY.com Business School Rankings couldn’t have come at more opportune time. As they solely rely on the people’s verdict on B-schools, I trust the rankings to be better judge of merit than most magazines. The outcome of this survey will undoubtedly be my top criterion for choosing the B-Schools to apply to.”

Abhijit Nath, an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus of 2005, working in a private equity role with Deutsche Bank said, “I find the PaGaLGuY.com B-school Rankings by far the only credible and accurate method for ranking Indian b-schools. By drawing from the crowd-perception, in a well grounded statistical manner, this system eliminates all possibilities of bias. The Rankings will go a long way in determining the aspirants’ choice of B-schools.”

On being asked the need for such a survey, Allwin Agnel, the founder of PaGaLGuY.com – an MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania said “At Pagalguy.com we believe it is important for people to know how business schools are perceived on a national basis across various interest groups such as students, recruiters etc and our user base allows us to capture that data effectively. With an increasing number of MBA aspirants applying every year to B-schools, we found it pertinent to launch a survey that reins in the people’s opinion to measure the popularity of a B-school."

The survey will run up to December 31 after which the results would be declared on January 2, 2008. The rankings will help students make an informed decision about their choice of B-school based on their nationwide perception. The PaGaLGuY.com rankings are designed to be a credible and accurate measure of how India thinks about its B-schools.

For more information, please contact

Apurv Pandit

+919833181041

+91-22-22644747