Introduction
For most Class 12 students aspiring to get into an IIM, there is only one road they believe: do a regular undergraduate degree, write CAT, and apply for an MBA. A few years ago that belief was true. Not these days. Today there are more than a dozen IIMs and IIT Mandi which take students directly from Class 12 in four different degree formats, and picking the wrong exam for the institute you want to get into is a very common, avoidable mistake.
I am writing this from within the system, not from without it. I am currently pursuing a Bachelor of Management Studies at IIM Sirmaur and a Data Science degree at IIT Madras, and this year I personally went through IIM Indore’s IPM interview round after scoring 216 on IPMAT in 2025 and 225 in 2026. All the facts in this guide were cross-checked with the concerned institute’s own admissions page, rather than being copied from some other article. And in the process I found real errors that are still making rounds across dozens of other sites, including the wrong exam attached to the wrong institute. I’ll point out those corrections as we go.
IPM: The Five Year Way
The original format is the Integrated Programme in Management, or IPM. Five years. Bachelor’s after three years. MBA at the end. No CAT needed at any point.
What trips people up is that IPM is not one exam, it is three, and they are not interchangeable.
IPMAT Indore, run by IIM Indore itself, is the most popular. A good score here also gets you considered at IIM Ranchi, IIM Shillong, and IIM Amritsar, none of which conduct a test of their own. BMS at IIM Sirmaur, my own program, runs on this same score too.
IPMAT Rohtak is a different exam conducted by IIM Rohtak and is valid only for Rohtak. A good Indore score means nothing here, and vice versa. Every year applicants lose an entire admission cycle by mixing up the two.
JIPMAT, conducted by the NTA (the same body conducting JEE and NEET), is the way to IIM Bodh Gaya and IIM Jammu.
There are a couple of things you might want to know before you settle on one of them. First, Mathematics is a must in Class 12 at IIM Shillong and IIM Amritsar, but not necessarily at every IPM institute. Secondly, and this is seriously underreported, IIM Bodh Gaya and IIM Jammu do not have an interview round at all; selection there is purely based on the JIPMAT score. Bodh Gaya uses board marks only as a tiebreaker, and Jammu folds Class 10 and 12 marks directly into the composite score. Every other IPM institute on this list, on the other hand, has a Personal Interview with real weightage at the end, so if an interview genuinely unsettles you more than a written exam does, Bodh Gaya and Jammu are worth weighting higher.
Know everything about IPMAT Exam Pattern
Beyond IPM: BMS, BBA, and the New Wave of BSc/BS
IPM is no longer the only gateway. This is where most existing guides online are out of date, since three other formats have opened up in the last two years alone.
IIM Kozhikode offers a four-year BMS at its Kochi campus, based on its own aptitude test. The unique feature: unlike most on this list, it heavily weighs your Class 10 and 12 marks in the shortlisting process, along with the test itself.
IIM Bangalore’s three-year BBA in Digital Business and Entrepreneurship is the most flexible entry point on this whole list. It is mostly online and takes its own entrance test, a CUET score, or a JEE Main score. There is no age limit at all.
IIM Udaipur is the real outlier. Its BBA has no entrance exam at all; admission is purely on Class 12 completion and document verification, delivered online and Hindi-first, with English available. So if the real barrier was always going to be a test of English aptitude rather than the coursework itself, this was the route for you.
IIM Jammu also offers a separate, fully online eBBA programme in partnership with Accenture, accepting a broad spectrum of scores (JIPMAT, SAT, JEE Main, or CUET), making it one of the easiest programmes to qualify for regardless of the exam you might have already attempted.
Then you have the latest programs, a set of BSc and BS degrees, and this is where the most commonly repeated blunder online resides. The assumption “a BS program takes JEE” is not a safe one. IIM Bangalore’s BSc (Economics or Data Science) has a separate test. The BS in AI and Business Analytics by IIM Lucknow is the most rigorous path on this list, with JEE Advanced as a prerequisite (not JEE Main), along with compulsory Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics. IIM Mumbai is taking only JEE Main for its new BS in Digital Science.
This assumption totally falls apart at IIM Sambalpur, and it is worth explaining in detail because I have seen the same wrong claim repeated across many other websites. Sambalpur has two BS programs. Its Data Science and AI program does consider JEE Main. But its Management and Public Policy program doesn’t touch JEE at all, it runs on the IPMAT Indore score instead, after Sambalpur dropped CUET for this specific program. Same institute, two buildings away, two totally different exams. Assume from the degree name and you will take the wrong test.
Outside the IIM System: Indian Institute of Technology Mandi
Though it does not carry an IIM tag, IIT Mandi’s School of Management runs a five-year Integrated MBA, a BBA in Analytics folded into an MBA in Data Science and AI, and deserves to be on this list. Admission is through a JEE Main Paper 1 score and a Personal Interview, in a seventy-thirty ratio. But the eligibility bar is higher than almost anything else here: seventy-five percent in Class 12, compared to about sixty percent everywhere else, with Mathematics and English both compulsory, and the JEE Main score has to meet the JEE Advanced cutoff threshold, not just pass.
Know more about best IPMAT colleges in India.
What Truly Prepares You for the Interview Round
This is the part of my own journey I think it’s worth being upfront about, because it’s the one piece of this process that no aggregator article can give you secondhand.
I did not do a single mock interview when I got admission into IIM Sirmaur. I memorized canned answers and thought that was sufficient. In the year I applied to IIM Indore, I did more than twenty-five mock interviews, most of them on Afterboards, with mentors already studying at IIMs. That difference is the whole lesson.
There is a difference between knowing the answer in your head and speaking it aloud to someone who is waiting for you to talk, and no amount of reading can bridge that gap. The mocks did three specific things reading could not. They bridged the gap between knowing an answer and delivering it under pressure. They trained me for questions I was not ready for, since a real interview panel doesn’t stay inside your script. And they made me sit through my own vulnerabilities out loud, including my first-semester CGPA, until accounting for it no longer felt like a flinch but a fact I could hold steadily.
If you can take one practical lesson from this entire guide, let it be this: don’t practice alone, and don’t settle for a friend who tosses you soft questions. Get people who’ve actually been on the other side of this process to come at you unscripted, right down to the exact parts of your profile you’d rather they left alone.
Choosing Your Path
A few honest rules of thumb from all of the above:
- Want the MBA guaranteed at the end, without having to reapply later? IPM is still the only format that does that automatically.
- Good in Maths and Physics but not sure if B.Tech is for you? The JEE-based routes, IIM Lucknow through JEE Advanced, and IIM Mumbai, Sambalpur’s Data Science BS, and IIT Mandi through JEE Main, let your current preparation serve as your application.
- Like IPMAT over JEE but want a BS degree? The Management and Public Policy program at IIM Sambalpur is the one path designed for precisely that, but almost nobody knows it exists.
- Not your strongest starting point in English? The BBA at IIM Udaipur was designed with the understanding that there is no entrance exam at all.
Summary
One road was mapped. Now it has a dozen or so, and not all of them pass through the same gate, or the same exam, or the same interview process. The most expensive mistake in this whole landscape is preparing for the wrong test because you thought one degree label meant one exam. Confirm the exact exam directly on the concerned institute’s own admissions page before you spend months preparing for it. More than any one tip in this guide, that one habit is what will actually get you through the door you are aiming for.
Krishna Chagti is an 18-year-old venture builder studying a BMS from IIM Sirmaur and a BS in Data Science from IIT Madras. He has a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and has published two academic research preprints. This year he cracked the Personal Interview round of IIM Indore with 216 marks in IPMAT 2025 and 225 marks in IPMAT 2026. He writes about academic research and venture building at Conyso.
