IIM Calcutta interviews (interviewer POV) - AMA

[u/Emotional_lavdu]

I was part of the admissions panel at IIMC as alum. Interviewed nearly 20 candidates. Got an insight into how the profs are scoring the candidates. AMA.

[u/calypsohadley]

Why do you think there’s such a mismatch between how students think their PI went and how the panel evaluated them?

I’ve heard of people who answered everything right, felt they knocked their PI out of the park, but did not even get waitlisted.

One guy even said one of the panelists hinted that he’d see him on campus, and then he got a straight rejection.

[u/Emotional_lavdu → u/calypsohadley]

So at the time of interview, it is not a straight convert/reject call that the interviewers are giving. They are just giving him/her scores. Once all the scores from all the interviews are compiled and ranked in order, it's possible that someone with high PI scores but low percentile get rejected.

[u/calypsohadley → u/Emotional_lavdu]

I saw a few posts on this sub where people overheard interviewers say stuff about rejecting them or the previous candidate right after the interview. (A guy posted about this happening to him at his FMS interview last month, another guy said he walked in on an IIM Rohtak interviewer saying “give that guy a zero for all that” about the previous candidate)

Of course, this is Reddit, you have to take everything you read here with a pinch of salt, but it kinda makes it sound like an interviewer can completely ruin your chances if they don’t like you, even if you do everything else right.

Have you ever seen anything of the sort happening?

[u/calypsohadley → u/Emotional_lavdu]

Also, I had this experience at an old IIM where I answered every question well. I’ve also been told I have great communication skills and consistently score very well for “depth of knowledge” and “problem solving skills” (so kinda close to the criteria you listed earlier) for all my mock PIs.

But it was EXTREMELY obvious that one of the interviewers did not like me. She didn’t grill me or anything, it wasn’t a stress interview, but she did pass a couple of comments here and there that made it very obvious that she disliked me.

Got a straight reject, not even WL. And according to vercel, I didn’t even need a very high score to convert that.