Crisil initiates grading of business schools

Rating agency Crisil has launched its pioneering service, grading of educational institutions, beginning with the business school segment. Under this service, Crisil will provide an independent, robust and all round assessment of the ability of an institute to impart quality education and achieve desired student outcomes through the graded programmes. At the launch event, Crisil released grades for 24 management programmes, covering 20 institutes from Bhubaneshwar (1), Chennai (1), Coimbatore (1), Delhi (3), Gurgaon (1), Guwahati (1), Hyderabad (1), Mumbai and Navi Mumbai (5), Noida (1) and Pune (5).

"Greater transparency and availability of benchmarks in the education sector are key pillars in the agenda of human capital development in India. We spent a year in developing and testing our criteria and methodology for business school evaluation. Our process uses quantitative as well as qualitative assessment parameters. We are delighted that so far, 30 business schools across India have come forward to get their programmes evaluated," Roopa Kudva, managing director and CEO, Crisil.

Starting with the grading of programmes offered by business schools, Crisil will, over time, cover other categories of educational institutions. The grading is not a ranking exercise for management education programmes. It is an in-depth and interactive evaluation exercise which will classify management education programmes on an eight-point scale: from ‘A......’ to ‘B’.

"The rigorous assessment process followed by Crisil was an enriching experience. The assessment process was very comprehensive covering every aspect such as vision, mission, pedagogy, industry alignment, admission, assessments, industry interface, placement, extra-curricular and co-curricular activities. Many of Crisil’s observations have been factored in our development plans," added Prof Praveen Puri, director, Skyline Business School.

A comprehensive report on each graded programme with insights into student profile, faculty profile, curriculum, and best practices adopted by the institute, will be available free of charge online. This sharing of best practices and the benchmarking on a relative scale, will contribute, over time, to an improvement of overall quality standards in the sector.

The gradings will benefit several stakeholders. Students and parents can make better informed choices about business schools. Recruiters will be able to obtain a wealth of information on business school programmes which will enable their recruitment efforts to be more focused and better aligned with corporate objectives. The evaluation process will provide the institutes themselves with valuable feedback from an independent agency; they can use this feedback to set for themselves a quality improvement agenda.

India has a large number of business schools (almost 2,500). Crisil has, therefore, incorporated a unique feature - each programme is graded on a national scale (relative to other such programmes across India) and a state scale (relative to other such programmes in the same state). This is designed to provide practical decision making inputs to both students and recruiters, who may wish to study in or recruit from specific geographic areas, respectively.