Evaluating and Ranking Candidates for MBA Program: Mahalanobis Taguchi System Approach

MBA is one of the most preferred career choices, students make to pursue their post graduation studies. It is often perceived that the quality and success of MBA program also depends on the merit and distinction of the incoming students. The objective of our study is twofold: a) to rank the candidates, based on their suitability for the program and b) select and shortlist the criteria that influence in the evaluating best students for MBA program. In this work, we present a multi-criteria evaluation framework using Mahalanobis Taguchi System (MTS) approach. Various criteria considered in our study are scores obtained by a candidate in class 10, class 12, and scores at qualifying degree, work experience, entrance test marks, group exercise score and personal interview score. MTS uses Mahalanobis Distance (MD) to quantify the deviation of a candidates score(s) from supposedly ideal scores, whereas, orthogonal array (OA) and the signal/noise (SN) ratio are used to optimally select the criteria for evaluation. This study may help institutions and universities to select better quality students.