The methodology has been changed from the one used last year (Outlook, September 10, 2001), to give weightage to the perception of different stakeholders-recruiters, faculty and students of the various business schools. There were two reasons for this. ,p> One, we felt that mere numbers like median salary or the number of computers do not tell the full picture, there are qualitative aspects of the education provided in business schools which figures do not necessarily reflect.
Two, there are always apprehensions that a few business schools may be fudging figures and submitting inflated numbers to jack up their ranks. Wherever we felt any doubt about the veracity of the figures given by any business school, we conducted validation exercises and even made field visits to the schools. We must mention here that over 70 B-schools had to be dropped, some of them otherwise big names, for fudging data. But given the number of responses and finite time span, it is humanly impossible to validate every piece of data submitted by all the B-schools. But if we bring in the perceptual scores, they effectively neutralise any misrepresentation of data by a school.
Red-Taped To Death? 
