How we verify every number on this site

The principle

Every placement number on Collvera is sourced from one of three places:

• The college's own audited placement report — a Chartered Accountant-stamped document with a UDIN (Unique Document Identification Number) that lets you verify it directly with ICAI.
• The NIRF Annual Disclosure — the Ministry of Education's official data submission required from every ranked institution.
• The college's published fee schedule — the official tuition + hostel + other charges as listed on the college website or admissions handbook.

We never scrape from third-party aggregators. We never use "expected" or "predicted" numbers. If we can't find a verified source for a data point, we mark it as missing rather than guess.

What we track

For each of the 58+ colleges in our database:

• Placements: Average CTC, median CTC, highest CTC, batch size, placement rate, recruiter list, sectoral breakdown
• Fees: Tuition, hostel, mess, total program cost
• Admissions: CAT/XAT/GMAT/NMAT cutoffs by category (General, EWS, NC-OBC, SC, ST, PwD), profile-weighting matrix, GD-PI patterns
• Cohort: Female %, work-experience distribution, engineering / non-engineering split, age distribution
• Audit status: Whether the placement report is CA-certified with UDIN, the auditor's name, the audit date

What we don't track

Some numbers commonly cited elsewhere are unreliable. We deliberately don't report:

• PPO conversion rates — most schools don't disclose, the ones that do define "PPO" inconsistently
• 5-year post-MBA salary — no Indian B-school discloses verified 5-year alumni data
• Multi-year placement consistency — most reports show only 1 year; tracking trend over time requires multi-year reports which most schools don't publish
• International placements at face value — many schools count an India-based role with a multinational as "international." We don't include these in the international number.

How we mark uncertainty

Numbers come with one of five status flags:

• Verified — audited placement report with UDIN OR official college document published within last 12 months
• Approximate — close, sourced from NIRF or a credible secondary disclosure, but not directly from the latest audit
• Self-reported — from the college without independent verification (we flag this)
• Expected — projection based on prior years' data (used rarely, always labeled)
• Missing — we couldn't find a source; shown as "data being verified" rather than guessed

Refresh cadence

Every college is re-verified at minimum once every 90 days. Major colleges (IIM A/B/C, ISB, XLRI, FMS) are checked monthly. Updates are immediate when:

• A new audited placement report drops
• NIRF releases the annual ranking
• An official fee revision is published
• The college issues a press statement about admissions or batch composition

Each college page shows the date of last verification.

Computed insights

Beyond raw numbers, we compute signals that aren't directly disclosed:

• Fee payback months — Total Fees ÷ (Avg CTC ÷ 12). FMS Delhi: 0.9 months. IIM A: 9.4 months.
• Female cohort delta — year-over-year movement (MDI: 18.3% → 49.5% in 2 years)
• Recruiter overlap — for any 2 colleges, which firms hire from both
• Profile-fit score — your CAT × academics × work-ex weighted against each college's historical conversion patterns

What we don't do

This part matters. We don't:

• Run an affiliate program — no college pays us for placement on the site. No "sponsored" colleges. No paid listings.
• Sell user data — your eligibility check inputs are not shared with coaching institutes, lead generators, or third parties.
• Show ads — no Google AdSense, no display network, no programmatic.
• Force lead capture before showing data — every comparison, cutoff, and FAQ is free to read without entering an email.
• Operate an admissions consultancy — we don't sell counselling, profile-building services, or "shortlisting reports."

Who built this

Collvera is built and run by AI. The discovery layer, the chat, the eligibility scoring, the comparison engine, the FAQ corpus, the editorial deep dives — all generated by Claude, then cross-checked against the verified source data (audited placement reports, NIRF disclosures, official college documents) at every step.

There is no admissions counsellor on call, no sales team, no affiliate funnel. The output of every model call is verifiable against the sources we cite.

For data questions, methodology corrections, or press inquiries: see the press page.