Reason for enrollment:
I’ll be honest here. This wasn’t a planned career move for me. I seemed to have a lot of free time on my hands and someone I knew had enrolled and thought the material was excellent. So when a salesman accosted me in Hyderabad in April 2008, I said yes.
Course material:
The course material has been pretty good for the most part. It is an MBA course and there is a fair bit of BS involved, of course.
Curriculum:
The course includes groups A through J. You take either two or, more likely, four exams for each group. Group J is general dross. More on that later. The course could do with some serious streamlining. Be prepared to spend a fair bit of time preparing for these exams. It isn’t a cakewalk by any means.
Things started getting really repetitive about a year after I started. I was going through the last few subjects thinking, "What’s the point of this? Have I not seen this before?"
Classes:
Didn’t enrol in any so I can’t comment. I didn’t have too much trouble taking the exams with ICFAI’s coursework. More on that later.
Grading:
I looked at some reviews some time in 2009 and I was surprised people were find it difficult to clear these exams. Then it all started making sense. My scores started dropping drastically as time went on. There really wasn’t any correlation to subject difficulty or effort on my part. Perhaps there’s another explanation but I could only conclude that it’s a part of the ICFAI business model. I still managed to clear groups A through I comfortably without having to rewrite anything.
Then I get to group J which is called ’Integrated Case Studies’ which has no course material associated with it. It’s no different from the ’Annotation’ stuff that I’ve been handling since Class 6 and you can’t really prepare for this. Essentially you are given some verbose passages that go along the lines of ’Company X saw a downturn starting DDDD. The reasons included ...’. This is followed by questions such as, "Why did company X see a downturn?". All you should need to clear these are some reading comprehension skills and basic command of English grammar. I like to believe that I’m not lacking in either area.
So I finish those papers and heave a huge sigh of relief thinking I’m done with my course. I’m told later that I scored 20% on this even though I cleared the ’proper’ subjects quite comfortably.
I’ve reached the conclusion - feel free to convince me otherwise - that I have fallen for a crooked operator. I do not intend to rewrite those silly ’Integrated Case Studies’ papers, nor do I care to have a degree from a dodgy operator on my resume. I certainly intend to spread the word around though.
If you are looking for an MBA, there are better options around.