BBA core course requirements

This post was inspired by a comment posted by student in response to my posting "Grades, college, & life":

i agree entirely with what you say, but how representational is that attitude with the current BBA program? We are required to take 13 courses in the business school, and truly only allowed to elect around 5 or 6 of our own. if we are being required to study material that we are not interested in because of these CORE requirements...doesn't grades become the only motivation?

What an amazingly interesting and useful comment! I happen to completely disagree with it but it's something that I can respond to and recognize as coming from a BBA.

Here's an (extended) excerpt from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled "Has Harvard lost its way?" (by Harry R. Lewis, March 24, 2006). Professor Lewis is a professor at Harvard and previously served as dean of Harvard College. In this piece he is speaking of Harvard but he could just as easily (for my purposes) be speaking of Michigan:

[Harvard] headed toward the conclusion that its students are free agents and for the most part should study what they wish. ... Undergraduate education defined [as Harvard currently defines it] allows professors to do as they wish as well. In an effort to persuade me that I should back the newly proposed, requirement-light curriculum, one professor offered that it meant we faculty members would no longer have to teach students who did not want to take our courses. But the courses from which students learn the most are often the ones they would be disinclined to take without being pressed to do so. The general-education courses I took on Western philosophy stretched and rewarded me, and the core course I teach on information technology and society plays that role for my students. If professors can define their job as teaching what they wish to those who wish to be taught it, Harvard will not carry the centuries-old ideal of a liberal education forward into the next generation. It will instead indulge students' inclinations to learn more of what they know already, while avoiding unpleasant but enlightening disagreements among professors about the relative importance of different studies. Liberal education will be reduced to an easy compromise among academics rather than a long-term commitment to the welfare of students and the society they will serve.

This states my worries about the direction that undergraduate education is going quite well. But here's the essence of it for me: A great university in its undergraduate liberal arts education 1) should help students to (as Dr. Lewis states) "understand the complexities of the human condition" and 2) "challenges its students to ask questions that are both disturbing and deeply important." An undergraduate business education should provide its students with a broad understanding of business in the context of providing a liberal arts education.

When I taught my database and Web site development class (BIT320), it was actually a philosophy class operating under the disguise of a technology class. I wanted to help students think about the world in an entirely different way, one that was not accessible to them before they took the class. I certainly enjoyed teaching this to students electing to take the class. However, the class I most enjoyed teaching was BIT301 — a required introduction to computing for the whole BBA class. This class required me (and my students) to get our heads around a vast array of topics, and required me to figure out how to present these topics in a manner that was accessible though still challenging to students with a wide set of differing backgrounds. In turn, it required students to confront topics that did not immediately appeal to them but that would, to a great extent, be extremely helpful to them as they began their independent lives and careers.

Let me now react more directly to Steve's comments.

First, as he correctly states, the current BBA curriculum requires that you take many courses, leaving little room for electives. Yes, and we consider this a feature, not a bug, of the current curriculum (to borrow a phrase from my IT background). The "we" in the previous sentence refers to the faculty, alumni, the School's boards, and recruiters. The Ross School is not a school of finance, or a school of marketing — it is a school of business. We provide a general business education in the context of a liberal arts education. If a student wants a specialized education in some facet of business, then he or she should get an MBA with a specialization in that particular area of study; that's what a masters is for.

Second, implicit in this comment is the belief that studying something that is required cannot be (or, at least, frequently is not) enjoyed. Well, that's too bad. It does not have to be that way. This is something that is entirely under your control. Do what you can to make every course a positive learning experience. Learn to enjoy the analysis done in business economics, the detailed specifications created in a BIT course, the complexity of the human condition in M&O. These are all completely different, but each are enjoyable in their own way. Try to figure out how to mine each class for its particular gold.

The purpose of action-based learning

I'm currently supervising, in one way or another, eight different MAP projects. MAP is the 7-week program that almost all MBAs go through at the end of their first year. It is a project in which 4-6 MBAs work on a single problem defined by a single company. It's a difficult but highly engaging process.

It's hard to say exactly what students get out of this process, but they clearly (to me, anyway) do get a lot out of it. I've been thinking a bit about this recently. I alluded to it in an email I sent to a member of one of the teams that I supervise:

You need to focus on developing an actionable plan for [the company] based on data. Keep picturing yourself giving the final presentation and having them ask you "why should we believe you?" — what you're doing now is essentially writing the answer to that question, the question that broadly determines the success of your project.

If the students take this lesson to heart, then — to me, anyway — they have learned what they're supposed to learn from MAP. When you're in business, it's no longer about being smart. It's no longer about doing the best analysis. It's about making your company successful. And this involves doing things and not simply ordering more analysis to be completed. These things usually involve making stuff (faster, more efficiently, more effectively, or just better stuff) or selling stuff (more of it, for a higher price). And, generally, doing MAP drives this point home in a most effective way.

There's nothing like standing in front of a CEO and having him or her, at the end of your presentation, say something like "Yes, I hear you, but why should I believe you? Other smart people have told me to do the exact opposite thing." And you realize that you haven't collected enough (or the right) data in order to back up your conclusions. Or, even worse, "Uh, that's all nice, but what are we supposed to do about all this?" And you realize that you've analyzed the situation but you haven't gotten down to the bare details of what specific people are supposed to do at specific times and what the payoff will be for those tasks.

Business is about doing the right things well. MAP drives this point home for the MBAs.

Handling job fly-backs and multiple job offers

Sometimes a BBA is in the enviable position of receiving a job offer while at the same time being involved in the recruiting process for one or more other companies. This can sometimes lead to a difficult situation of having a scheduled fly-back (or other significant recruiting event) when the student is close to accepting an offer from another company. Students need to realize that this is a good thing, not a bad thing — but it can quickly become a very bad thing if the student does not handle the situation correctly. In a recent situation, a student accepted a job offer and then cancelled on a non-refundable ticket for a fly-back at the last minute without following up with staff at the School who had worked to build the Ross relationship with that company. This left the recruiting company with a very bad feeling about the level of maturity of our students and left staff at the School with egg on their faces for standing behind the maturity level and integrity of the student. This is what's known as a Very Bad Thing.

There are many facets of this situation that the student needs to be aware of when they consider what to do in this situation. (From here on down, I'll assume the student is a female for the ease of explication.)

• The student is a representative of the Ross School and the University of Michigan. The student needs to remember that she is not out interviewing on her own; she is an ambassador of the School and the University and needs to conduct herself as such.
• The student is the beneficiary of the relationships that the School and the University have maintained over many years, or that we hope to build in the future. Companies do not come to Ross to interview specific students. They come because we have built up these relationships and because they have had good experience with our students in the past. Current students should be aware of this good will that has been built up over many years and do their best to build it up rather than simply to draw on it or to use it up.
• Staff in OCD, the BBA Program Office, the Women's Initiative, Student Life, and elsewhere throughout the School sometimes draw on the relationships built up over time and put themselves on the line for students.
• Industries are small worlds unto themselves and word travels fast about a person's integrity. People never really know what the future will hold. Even if the student is turning down a position right now being offered by person A at company B, the student might later want a job in the future 1) at company B, or 2) at company C (where person A might have moved to). You just never know when you might cross paths with the person sitting across the table from you. Further, people do not quickly forget being treated poorly or with a lack of respect. Being put in a difficult position is one thing — but not handling it with delicacy, tact, and respect is quite another.

For all of the above reasons, when a difficult situation comes up, a student should work with OCD (or with other staff throughout the School whom she might have been working with) to attempt to resolve the difficulty. Believe me, these people have seen these situations many, many times. The wrong approach is to back out at the last minute and hope that no one will notice. People will notice and the School will hear about it — and the relationship might be irreparably damaged. This may not hurt the student right now, but future students will lose an option. If this happens too many times, then future students will be in a real bind and the School's reputation will be badly hurt.

So, for everyone's sake, think about the bigger picture and work with the School's staff. In the long run, you and the School will be better off.

Preparing in high school for college math and science

Margaret Spellings, the U.S. Education secretary recently told a U.S. Senate committee that students need to be better prepared for college-level math and science classes.

One of the big pushes in the plan to enact this is to expand the Advanced Placement program so that more high school students have access to it. I generally support such an idea but I have a couple personal reactions to it. Note these are based on my experiences and don't necessarily reflect official UM or Ross School policy or even some recent research.

First, if a student is at a school that offers tons of AP classes (I'm talking 6, 20, or even more classes), she shouldn't feel compelled to take a huge number of them. Take three or maybe four of them; there's no need for the student to swamp herself with work that keeps her from participating in extra-curricular activities. The student does want to demonstrate to readers of her college application that she was interested in taking a difficult and diverse set of college preparatory courses. She doesn't necessarily want to place out of too many freshman-level classes during her freshman year and start taking lots of classes with "seasoned" sophomores. Doing this a few times in the first year might work out, but do this too many times and her performance can suffer.

Second, but on a related point, a student shouldn't necessarily let an AP class and test be a substitute for college math. College math courses can be quite difficult. Placing out of the initial Calculus class and starting the college math curriculum with the second Calculus class can make the jump to college math quite daunting. I'm not saying that it shouldn't be done; I'm just saying that the student should consider simply taking the college math class even though she took the AP class.

This is what I did when I went to Furman University many moons ago. I took Calculus when I went to Dunwoody High School and actually did fairly well. I went to Furman on a math scholarship but I still took calculus from John Poole as a freshman. I thought it would help solidify my knowledge of calculus, would introduce me to math at the college level, and would (hopefully) provide me with an easy A. The first two held true — though, while I did get an A in the class, the grade didn't come easily.

In any case, I encourage high school students to take as many demanding math and science classes as they can fit into their schedule. It will pay off in college.

What to do in high school to ensure you get a degree

A new report issued by the U.S. Department of Education studies thousands of students over an eight year period to determine what factors are positively correlated with getting a college degree. According to the press release:

The study ... found that the academic intensity of a high school curriculum is the strongest indicator of postsecondary degree completion, regardless of a student's major course of study.

Specifically, (and this quote is from the article about the study in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

[T]aking math beyond Algebra 2 and three classes in laboratory science (biology, chemistry, and physics) in high school provided greater "academic momentum" than taking three classes in foreign languages and any Advanced Placement courses.

This report also pointed out the positive correlation between getting credit in non-traditional times --- e.g., before college actually begins, or during the summer. According to the Chronicle article, "[e]arning some college credits while still in high school is positively associated with degree completion." Finally, "[e]arning more than four credits during summer terms correlated positively to degree completion, particularly for black students."

How to fairly test and grade a multiple section course

A student recently asked me about a test she had taken. This course has multiple sections and she had questions about how the test was administered. When a course has multiple sections, the School is generally supportive of the professor's efforts to give the exam in one large sitting. However, sometimes this isn't possible (for any of a number of reasons). So, in this case, when the exam is given at several times, the professor has to take steps to minimize the sharing of information between sessions.

The next step is to figure out how to assign grades on the exam: Should letter grades be assigned within a section or across sections?. This question is pertinent in both core and elective courses because there is a grading curve that applies to each.

Across

A student is compared with students in all the sections. The student's grade is affected by how students perform in other sections; this should allow a more accurate measure of how each student performs relative to all the students in the course. On the other hand, if the student is in a section that does not perform as well on the exam, then he or she would receive a lower grade than he or she would receive if the grades were not determined this way.

Within

A student is compared with other students in his or her own section. If the student is in a section that performs better on the test than other sections (for whatever reason), then that student would receive the same or a lower grade than he or she would have received when in another section. On the other hand, the student would not be receive a lower grade simply because students in another section scored higher on the test.

The across sections method is more appropriate when multiple sections are taught by the same professor or when the professors work hard to coordinate the content presented across sections. This method also has the feature that it discourages students from sharing information about the exam. However, in any case, the professor (or professors) have complete discretion to assign grades in whichever method he (or they) see fit.

Being tough and working hard

I'm in the middle of reading an article by Bill Simmons on ESPN.com that is transcript of an email exchange with Malcolm Gladwell, a writer at the New Yorker and the author of Blink and The Tipping Point. (Here's a review of Gladwell's work.) In any case, Gladwell wrote this wonderful little passage about believing in yourself and working hard:

Why don't people work hard when it's in their best interest to do so? ... The (short) answer is that it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. I swear that's why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I'll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don't study for tests — which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you're stupid — and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder.

Which type are you? Are you putting yourself on the line every day? Or are you giving yourself excuses so that, when you fail, you don't have to doubt yourself?