The world renowned Cranfield School of Management in the UK will present a scholarship to any member of the three leading IFAC accountancy bodies in Sri Lanka, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), the Institute of Chartered Accountants Sri Lanka (ICASL) or the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants Sri Lanka Branch (CIMA). Full Time MBA Programme Director Sean Rickard who informed Sri Lanka of the scholarship said, “We hope the scholarship attracts candidates who will benefit from this initiative and that, with the help of the accounting bodies in Sri Lanka, it will raise Cranfield’s profile. We are extremely grateful for the support of the institutes in this. We will be reviewing the success of the programme after two years.”

ACCA Sri Lanka’s Immediate Past President, Dilshan Rodrigo, himself an alumni of the Cranfield School of Management extends his best wishes to all candidates and says, “I hope most sincerely that this initiative will signal the birth of a new generation of professional skilled managers who will add value to the corporate boardrooms of Sri Lanka.” Stating that this is truly a world class MBA ranked consistently as one of the top MBAs in Europe, he adds, “This one year full time programme is ideally suited for members in middle and senior management positions with ambitious career goals.” Rodrigo, who has continued to maintain ties with Cranfield, further reinforced the relationship once he became President of ACCA Sri Lanka, sourcing resource speakers for the ACCA National Conferences in the last two years. “Two people who played significant roles in mooting this scholarship from the Cranfield end are the former Director of the MBA Programme Professor Leo Murray who was the Keynote Speaker at our conference in 2006 and has a soft spot for Sri Lankans and Sri Sriskanthan, a Sri Lankan faculty member on the MBA programme.”

Cranfield has produced a distinguished honour roll of MBA alumni from Sri Lanka over the last two decades including Managing Director of Hatton National Bank Rajendra Theagarajah, Senior Vice President of WNS Arul Sivagananathan and Group Financial Controller of Stretchline Hasantha de Silva. Members of ICASL, ACCA and CIMA must apply directly to Cranfield School of Management, for which instructions are available on the Cranfield website ww.som.cranfield.ac.uk/som/mba/, marking the application ‘Sri Lanka Scholarship’.

More : dailymirror.lk

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The new admission policy adopted by the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow (IIM-L), has resulted in high “admission acceptance rate”. In 2007, the last admitted candidate was ranked 85th on the waiting list, but this year the rank has dropped to just 25. The fact assumes importance because IIM-L has increased the number of seats from 270 to 330 this year but, despite that, it has managed to fill seats quite easily compared to last year.

The final selections, as per the admission policy 2008, have been done after taking into account the performance of the candidates right from class X till graduation, Combined Admission Test (CAT) results, group discussion and personal interview (GDPI) and work experience. “The comprehensive evaluation also provided us better candidates to select from,” Prof SKB Nair, chairman admissions, told TOI.

The selection was done in two stages. In the first stage, candidates were assessed on a five-point scale that included CAT 2007 score (30%), class X marks (5%), class XII (5%), graduation marks (5%) and experience profile (5%). The experience profile was rated on the basis of the period of work experience in months. Lowest 0.5 marks were given for 9-11 months work experience and highest five marks were allotted for work experience of 72 months or more.

In the second stage that was also on a five-point scale, candidates were assessed on the basis of their written ability test (10%), group discussion (10%), personal interview (20%), quality of academic qualification (5%) and quality of work experience (5%). Sum of all the 10 components (stage one and two take together) were taken for a final score of the candidates for preparing merit list for the final selections. Of 1586 candidates called for GDPI, 375 had been called exclusively by IIM-L.

The main list declared by GDPI had 734 candidates, including SC/ST, OBC and physically-challenged. Besides, a waiting list of 200 candidates, only for general category, was also declared. As a back up plan, a list of 80 OBC candidates was released after Supreme Court’s OBC quota verdict. GDPI of these 80 OBC candidates were held in Delhi on May 16 and 17. “Since we had more number of candidates who got calls only from IIM-L, the acceptance rate was high,” explained Prof Nair. Classes will start at IIM-L by June 26. However, candidates will be accommodated till June 30, as many change from one IIM to another till the last moment.

Another reason, according to the faculty members, for ‘high acceptance rate’ could be that IIM-L was one of the most affordable among all IIMs. The fee hike for the session 2008-09 in PGP course had been only Rs 50,000 (from Rs 2 lakh per annum to Rs 2.50 lakh). Further, the institute had given need-based scholarships worth Rs 48 lakh to 86 students in the previous session, the highest among all IIMs as per the officials. The scholarship amount may go up even further in the coming session.

More : timesofindia.indiatimes.com