All IIMs give weightage to past Academics (10th, 12th & Graduation). You can’t really change it. So if you’ve a bad profile, is it worth trying to appear for CATs?
Remember than IIMs have high weightage for CATs i.e. 50–60% and extra weightage for Work Experience. So if you’ve slightly bad profile you can compensate that by Scoring really high in CAT (99.80+) and gaining some more work Experience. But if you’ve really bad score, you surely need to analyse your chances.
Colleges like FMS & XLRI give no weigtage to past academics & colleges like MDI & SP Jain give very little relevance to your past academics. So you can aim for these colleges, which are better than most IIMs and even rank within the Top 10 B-Schools in India.
Following are profiles of some of the GENERAL candidates with bad profiles. (Note: OBC/ST/SC Candidates can compensate for bad profiles by scoring good marks in CAT)
A candidate with scores of 89%, 77% & 75% in X/XII/Grads managed to get calls from Lucknow & Kozhikode.
There’s another candidate with 84%, 83%, & 65% in X/XII/Grads. He was able to get calls from Calcutta, Kozhikode & Shillong.
Note: Some IIMs like IIM Bangalore normalise the Graduation & XIIth marks on the basis of Boards (CBSE/ICSE/State) or Colleges, so sometimes 80% in one college might be equivalent to 70% in another colleges. This normalisation is done on the basis of past data, so you can yourself use your intuition to get an idea about how good your marks are.