Attendance and internship optional at IIM-B

BANGALORE: Two boons to IIM-B students: No worry about attendance and no need to undergo rigorous summer internship with a corporate house.Indian Institute ofManagement-Bangalore (IIM-B) has ushered in radical reforms in its PGP coursethat will grant its freshmen the liberty to skip the two-and-half-month summerinternship if they come with 34 months of industry experience and its facultythe right to make attendance optional. “Instead of summer internship, weare suggesting to them to explore entrepreneurship, work for an NGO or take up aresearch project under a professor,” Ishwar Murthy, PGP chairperson,IIM-B, said. There are 73 students with more than 37 months of workexperience in this year’s batch of 382 students. Another traditionalinstitutional requirement — minimum 75% attendance in all courses —has been done away with. Individual instructors will now decide if there shouldbe a cap on attendance, and if so, what should be the cap. Hitherto, studentswith less then 75% attendance had to lose one grade point. Dhruv Shah, a first PGP student, said two of his six instructors have done away with the minimum 75% attendance requirement for the first term. “Four have stuck to the conventional attendance requirements. Though attendance has been made optional, many of my classmates automatically attend their classes,” he said. Prof. Murthy reiterated that although decision on minimum attendance requirement for every course has been left to the discretion of instructors, attendance will be recorded for every class and shown in the grade sheet. The B-school is also cutting down the length of a few final termcourses to bring in diversity. Currently each course fetches 3 credits and lasts10 weeks. Starting November, it will be five-week courses with 1.5credits.