IITians – in search of excellence

1981. Carbondale. Two out of three roommates I had were Vivek and Deva, two IIT Kanpur graduates. I was studying MBA at SIU, Carbondale and had been granted a rare fellowship most likely because of my excellent (99%ile) GMAT score.

Vivek and Deva had a friend Abinash(?) also from IIT Kanpur, who stayed in the campus for a month or so and then left for some other place. He had bought a used car which he had left behind.

One day, all of a sudden, Vivek turned to me, and told me not to be so proud of my MBA fellowship because their friend Abinash too had been offered an MBA fellowship at SIU-C. He rejected the offer and went elsewhere. Fine, I thought.

Shortly afterwards, I happened to be sitting  in the front seat passenger side. Just bored, I opened the glove box in front of me. There was a letter from SIU in it. t expecting to read a letter awarding fellowship to Abinash, casually I opened  it and started reading it. The letter clearly mentioned that  Abinash’s GMAT score was so low (below 30 percentile or so as guessing) that they could not even offer him admission. We never talked about Avinash’s fellowship offer again.

My estimate of IITians’ median score on GMAT/GRE general:

V:10% Q: 60%

(In comparison a 5th grader from China scores about 99% on quant sections.)