Mumbai: To break the monotony of tipping gender scales, IIMs have now decided to award special marks to girls and non-engineering students.

All the six new IIMs and the ones at Lucknow and Kozhikode feel it's time to rebalance the gender scales in office spaces. So while IIM-Rohtak will give 20 marks to each girl and another 20 to a non-engineer, IIM-Raipur will add 30 marks to the overall scores of each girl-non-engineer. IIM-Lucknow has decided to grant five marks to each girl and two to non-engineers.

IIM-L admissions chairman Arunabha Mukhopadhyay said that it is for the first time that they have taken a conscious decision to make the diversity on the campus richer. Hence apart from the CAT scores, academic performance in Class X and at the graduation level, and work experience, they will also award marks for two diversity factors — gender and academics.

Admission criteria were released by seven IIMs, months before the Common Admission Test. The new IIMs have also decided to do away with group discussions and will instead jointly hold a Written Ability Test (WAT).

IIM-Trichy director Prafulla Agnihotri said that the aim of the GDs was to test candidates' communication skills, their convincing powers, their leadership abilities and their teamwork. But then many students get coached to participate in GDs. And sometimes, students who can't raise their voices and are not aggressive just go unheard.

The older management schools—IIM-Bangalore, Calcutta, Lucknow, Kozhikode, Indore, will, like IIM-Ahmedabad, expect students to clear a "writing task" as well as conduct GDs and personal interviews.