XLRI Jamshedpur: No country for topper men

What is common between the following people and their Xavier"s Admission Test (XAT) 2011 scores? (Their XAT 2011 IDs are given inside the brackets.)

CR Mahesh (XAT441916)

VA - 99.07
QA - 99.97
RA - 97.2
Overall - 99.99

N Vijay Bhasker Reddy (XAT448096)

QA - 88.99
VA - 99.97
RA - 97.64
Overall - 99.97

Saket Saurav (XAT205282)

VA - 97.06
QA - 97.06
RA - 93.87
Overall - 99.55

Kunal Singh

VA - 98.47
RA - 93.01
QA - 92.86
Overall - 99.35

Kanishka Baronia (XAT244861)

VA - 92.16
QA - 96.71
DI - 97.2
Overall - 99.3

Sunil Kumar Rath (XAT421766)

VA - 99.54
QA - 84.57
RA - 99.10
Overall - 99.83

Sandeep Dhar Dubey (XAT213350)

VA - 97.21
QA - 99.8
RA - 92.05
Overall - 99.93

Shashank Prabhu (XAT446794)

VA - 98.8
QA - 99.87
RA - 93.87
Overall - 99.97

(Disclosure: The last score belongs to the author of this article.)

The answer — all of them have scored to be in the top 1 percentile of the entrance test and despite having cleared the cutoffs, the Xavier"s Labour Relations Institute (XLRI) School of Business and Human Resources, Jamshedpur, which owns the XAT, does not consider them fit enough for an admissions interview to its post-graduate Business Management (BM) or Human Resources Management (HRM) programs. XLRI declared its interview shortlist on January 26, 2011, a day after declaring the XAT results.

According to the XLRI website, the criteria it has used to shortlist candidates for the BM and HRM programs are,

For Human Resource Management Programme around 650 applicants having more than 85 percentile in VA, 70 percentile in QA, 75 percentile in AR, and overall 91 percentile have been shortlisted for Group Discussion and Personal Interview.

For Business Management Programme around 550 applicants having more than 70 percentile in VA, 90 percentile in QA, 80 percentile in AR, and overall 92 percentile have been shortlisted for Personal Interview.

As per this criteria, everyone in the list above should receive an HRM call and everyone except N Vijay Bhasker Reddy and Sunil Kumar Rath should receive a BM call. At last count, there were at least 55 people who despite clearing XLRI"s criteria had not been included in the interview shortlists.

CR Mahesh, whose 99.99 percentile makes him the XAT topper, hasn"t received an XLRI interview call for either BM or HRM. “XLRI is my dream college as it extends what I do at work. A 99.99 percentile means a lot to me and I will be very saddened to see it go waste without me getting a shot," he told PaGaLGuY.

These students have written to the XLRI Admission Office asking why they had not been included in the shortlist. Meanwhile, various theories are doing the rounds reasoning the anomalous shortlists, such as XLRI including the written essay in the percentiles, XLRI giving out profile-based calls or the affected candidates" applications not having reached the admissions office in time.

However on Friday, Jan 28, the affected candidates received some respite. There was a clarification put up on the XLRI website which said,

Candidates having percentile scores higher than respective cut off scores for BM/HRM (as given in http://www.xlri..ac.in/scripts/admprocess.php), AND have submitted their application for these programme(s) to XLRI within deadline, AND have not been shortlisted, are requested to send an email to [email protected] or Fax to 0657 398/665 3200.

PaGaLGuY spoke to the XLRI admissions office for a comment and they said, “As of now, we have not decided when the revised list will be put up as we are in the process of receiving emails. But, we can assure you that if you have cleared the criteria put up, you would be getting a call. The incident is a first for the institute and everything possible is being done to restore the faith in the process and the institute."

An XLRI aspirant from Gandhinagar has also reportedly received a reply which says that the issue will be resolved by the second week of February 2011.

The XLRI admissions process has been marred by technical snags at various junctures this year, right from non-receipt of form payments, problems with the online registration interface, candidates receiving incorrect SMSes that their applications hadn"t been received, and now this. However, XLRI"s relying on candidates to email them rather than invite everyone who qualifies by going through the XAT data again points to some deeper technological goof-up.