Projecting the theme ‘Know no Woe’, this year’s edition of MARWAR ’07, the week-long flagship ‘marketing war’ game at Bharathidasan Institute of Management, one of the premier B-Schools in India, turned out to be a virtual mirror reflecting to the first-year students what the future holds for them as team players and leaders.

BISMARC, the Marketing Club of BIM, prompted the freshers to grab opportunities to display their and creativity and gain hands-on experience on what marketing and conducting a business is all about. Fourteen seven-member teams from the I-years guided by two II-year students per team were pitted against each other in this marketing battle.

On Day one, MARWAR ’07 asked the students to come up with a product, its concept, name, logo and tagline. Day two followed with a market survey among the BIM students to determine the viability of the product. Each team was required to get authorisation from the virtual Government Boards, constituting the senior students.

After this initial screening process, students had to make advertisements for their product/ service and display them in and around the campus. Following this was an elimination process in which eight teams made it to the next stage. The members of the eliminated teams joined the other teams to strengthen them to accomplish their tasks.

Their next task was personal selling where they had to market their product idea personally to each II-year student. The weekend that followed was more entertaining with the teams setting up attractive stalls for their products and conducting exciting games to woo more people to their stalls.

A formal business presentation was the agenda on the afternoon of the last day when the teams had to present their business plan along with their financial statements to the BIM faculty panel. The last event of MARWAR ’07 was ADZAP. Each team had to advertise another team’s product and answer questions about the competitor’s product and their marketing strategy. The guides were then felicitated and the much awaited results were announced. Team OASIS emerged winners of MARWAR ’07, followed by the runners-up team MADE EASY and team CONNEXION.

BANGALORE: All these days you worried only about the CAT, now you have to fret about the RAT too. Welcome to the RAT race! Doctoral students enrolling for the Fellow Programme in Management at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIM-B) will have to clear another hurdle after the CAT — Research Aptitude Test (RAT).

Unlike CAT, RAT is not mandatory for all doctoral students. The eight areas offering doctoral programme have the discretion of conducting the test to shortlist candidates.

“We get about 500 applications for the doctoral programmes and we shortlist about 60 to 80 students. The faculty panel for each area then decides whether to hold the RAT or not. Though CAT tests the analytical skills of candidates, one cannot make out whether they are research-oriented.

Through RAT we test whether the candidate is inclined towards research or not,” L Prasad, chairperson (FPM), IIM-B, said. What is unique about RAT is that it an open-book, and at times, even a take-home exam. There are no fixed marks for it, nor any standard time limit.

“It is entirely up to the faculty panel appointed that year to decide what the RAT should comprise. We believe in faculty governance and do not want to micromanage things. Typically, the RAT will involve case study and/or two or three questions about the area candidate chooses to study.

Students can visit the library, refer books to solve the paper. The exam will be followed by an interview with the panel,” said Prasad. The panel also has the option of selecting candidates directly through interviews, without resorting to RAT. While all applicants taking the CAT pay an application fee, RAT is free.

Moreover,RAT is exclusive to IIM-B and other IIMs have no say either in shortlisting or selection of FPM students.

Currently, admission to all eight areas — corporate strategy and policy, economics and social sciences, marketing, organisational behaviour and human resource management, finance and control, productions and operations management, quantitative methods, information systems and computers, public systems and policy — are governed by RAT.