A management aspirant from Ahmedabad has dragged Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad (IIM-A) to court for rejecting his candidature.

A petition was filed by Raghav Sanjay Gupta in the Gujarat High Court, challenging the method of assessment and weightage given to the interview round after the Common Admission Test (CAT) examination.

The High Court has issued a notice to IIM-A, to which it has respond by July 6, when a further hearing would take place.

In the interim oral order, Justice Biren Vaishnav has asked the Institute to keep one seat for the admission to 2020-21 batch of Post Graduate Programme (PGP) course vacant - pending admission and hearing of the petition.

Senior counsel Navin Pahwa with Tirth Nayak appeared for the petitioner and appraised the court about the selection process of the Institute for its flagship PGP course and pointed out that "undue weightage, contrary to the settled position of law is being given to personal interview."

The petitioner has scored 206.86 marks in CAT 2019 examination scoring 99.95 percentile. He ranked in the top 110 students across India, the petition says. After scoring in CAT, the petitioner chose IIM-A for the admission, subsequently where he appeared for a personal interview as per the selection process. But the institute allegedly declared him unsuccessful in the Personal Interview.

"As per the institute, the final selection is done on the basis of (i) Personal Interview Multiplication Factor = 0.50. (ii) AWT Multiplication Factor = 0.10 (iii) CAT Score Multiplication Factor = 0.25 and (iv) Application Rating Multiplication Factor for final composite score = 0.15," the petition stated.

However, it also claims that no details on the break-up of the score had been provided to the petitioner and by a response, the institute had refused to entertain his application under the RTI Act on the ground that break-up of score is not provided as per admission policy.

The petitioner said, that Section 33 of the IIM Act, 2017 provides that the RTI Act will be applicable to the institute.

Institute’s comment

In its comment, the Institute stated, "CAT score carries a weight of 25% in the final selections to IIM-A. If a candidate performs poorly on other components such as personal interview and the writing test, then the chances to qualify for IIMA's post-graduate program in management (PGP) go down considerably."

Adding further it stated, "Our admission policy is announced at the beginning of the admissions cycle as is applied uniformly for all aspirants. IIMA has a highly transparent, fair and meritocratic admission process and we reply to all RTI queries."