The class of 2016: How to read the ratings

The methodology for the best Business School rankings uses a combination of self-audit by the institutes and an external rating by industry. The audit module has been refreshed to make it more robust.

The final ranking of the business schools that have participated this year has been obtained by arriving at a weighted composite score comprising the audit index and the perception index. The audit index is calculated on the basis of a self-audit (with suitable back-checks) by the B-schools on six different parameters. The perception index is a weighted score arrived at by merging ratings obtained from the industry - alumni and HR professionals.

Each parameter has been assigned a different weight based on the directions of an expert committee. (RATINGS)

The final scores are used to classify business schools in different categories. The categorisation has been done after analysing the distribution of the final scores and the inflection points on this distribution curve.

For example, at the two ends of the S-curve the inflection points are closer and, therefore, the sizes of the relative categories are smaller compared to the categories in the middle.

After the categorisation, percentile scores have been calculated for each parameter. Business schools in each category have been placed in an alphabetical order. That is why, in the Super League 1, Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi, is on top and XLRI, Jamshedpur, is at the bottom although on the basis of the overall score, it could be the other way round. In other categories, this could have resulted in schools with a lower overall score to be listed above those with a higher score.

The scores given in the table represent the percentile scores for all the six parameters of the audit module and the perception module. No mathematical operations like addition or subtraction can be done on these scores. Also, the percentile scores do not follow a decreasing pattern as we go down the list. So schools with a score of 90 can be in Super League 2 as well as in A1.