The IPM course is a five-year integrated course in management and after completion, you will be awarded an IPM diploma and not a degree. In order to do so, IGNOU was introduced to offer IPM students a degree.

IIM Indore has taken care of students needs who are willing to appear for further competitive examinations such as UPSC and others. Getting a degree will help them to apply for higher education.

In IGNOU, you can choose any subject as your graduation subject and many students even choose B.A or B.Com as their subject. If you wish to opt for 3 years, then you will have to give exams for IGNOU from where you will get your BA or B.Com degree. The students who complete their post-graduation get a PGDM and the students who opt for IPM get an IPM diploma. 

The majority of coaching classes often confuse the real purpose and meaning set behind an IPM programme. Surprisingly enough, they mostly treat it as they do to a regular BBA+MBA programme, without actually recognising the difficulty level essentially associated with it. 

• The difficulty level of IPMAT is several steps ahead of a general BBA examination. 
• Coaching centres function by preparing aspirants for the upcoming CAT exam or a general management entrance coaching.
• Rather than seeking advice from coaching centres, you can avail a specialized mentorship. Either from the students of the respective institute who have recently cleared the IPMAT exam, or choose visiting professors from the admission committee. 
• If you think it is not possible, then seek guidance from the alumni network or the current students. 
• Follow the previous year’s papers and understand the pattern of the questions. You can also seek help from the internet. 

Paying a bulky fee to coaching centers can oftentimes prove to be unnecessary. Your self-study, mostly combined with a vivid general knowledge, can suffice the needs of the exam. 

This is something that will vary according to the year of admission. For any category, students up to a certain rank are decided according to the seats they have and are given provisional admission letters. 

Thereafter if any student among them does not accept the offer and any seat is left vacant then only the next ranked candidate is offered the seat.

In previous years in the general category, students till the rank of 58 were offered the provisional admission letters and all others beyond the rank were in the consideration pool in case some students did not accept the offer.

There is no fixed routine for an IPM student at IIM Indore. It will vary from person to person. Mostly you will have 4 classes in a day on average starting from 10:15 AM and going on till 4:15 PM.

Some days you may have no class and someday you may have 6 classes. But 4 classes in a day is pretty common.

Apart from the academics, you will have other commitments such as group projects, live projects, research studies, worrying about internships, clubs and committee works as well as fests, hangouts with friends and many more.

You will get to sleep 10 hours a day sometimes and on other days you will hardly get 2 hours of sleep in a day. On average, the day of an IPM student starts at around 8 AM or 9 AM and goes on till 2 AM or 3 AM at the midnight.

My friend belonged to the first graduating batch of IPM participants. Currently, he is well placed in a reputed company. Here are a few insights you need to know according to his experience back then.

• Most of his batchmates bagged offers from pioneer recruiters like Credit Suisse, Deloitte, Nomura, JP Morgan, HDFC, IndusInd Bank, IBM, ICRA Management Consulting, Tata Sky, UAE Exchange, etc.
• The batch received good feedback from the recruiters in the first placement season of IPM that was highly encouraging. A leading credit rating agency remarked, “We found the candidates to have a good understanding of concepts and confidence to face the demand of the corporate world.”
• Most of the students were offered a finance role with the average salary package being 11.96 LPA, including International offers such as EA to CFO & MD by a leading international foreign exchange company.

Overall, the placement record for the first batch of IPM was surprisingly great. With an average package of 11 LPA and the highest package of about 30 LPA, IPM of IIM was a huge success.

Earlier you could not give the IAS exam after completing IPM because after 5 years you were not awarded a degree but a diploma certificate.

It has changed now, IPM offered by IIM Indore is a full time degree course and not a diploma course.

It is an Integrated program, which means the 5 years of the program will include both Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in the Management field.

If you are interested in pursuing management studies after your high school graduation, class 12th, then you can easily opt for IPM at IIM Indore.

One of my friends took T.I.M.E online coaching for IPM at IIM Indore and having read online reviews from similar aspirants here are some things I got to know.

• This is a 5 years course. The reviews are average. A good path would be to go for CAT after your graduation. 
• But if T.I.M.E is what you want, then it is undoubtedly a good coaching institute for the CAT exam preparation. However, it will only help you if you do serious preparation. 
• During the offline coaching, things would be different and you can perform much better than while learning at online coaching.

It is suggested that offline preparation in TIME would be much better than enrolling online. So try to enroll in a classroom course if possible.