Nov

4

Excelling at Excel

November 4, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | 4 Comments

Should all undergraduate business students study spreadsheet-based modeling?
For the past two years I’ve been thinking about this question, first as a member of the Provost’s Task Force for Quantitative Pedagogy, and now as a member of two follow-up efforts (the Weissman School’s “implementation committee” and the Zicklin School’s “quant group”). If you’ll bear with [...]

Sep

29

Teaching with Cases

September 29, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | 5 Comments

On September 22, 2009, we held the first of a three-part series on teaching with case studies. In the interest of furthering the discussion, I’ve tried to summarize questions that were raised by panelists and audience members. We’d be delighted to hear your comments. Thanks to all who contributed.

If the [...]

Sep

22

The Study Guide

September 22, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | 2 Comments

When I left industry to be a teacher in the mid 1990s, I took a class on “mathematics teaching methods” at a local college. The instructor, now the Emeritus Professor of Mathematics Richard Evans to whom I owe much gratitude, taught that prior to an exam, one should give students a “study guide” or “review [...]

Sep

4

The Sound of Silence

September 4, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | 2 Comments

Last night my executive MBA class discussed the case study “Deaconess-Glover Hospital” about a Massachusetts healthcare system that made significant improvements using the Toyota Production System. But before this column digresses into a “how do we improve healthcare?” debate, I’d like to share seven sentences Dr. Steven J. Spear wrote in the teaching note that [...]

Jul

2

Calculus vs. Probability & Statistics

July 2, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | 1 Comment

As many know, there are ongoing committees in both the Weissman and Zicklin Schools working toward improving the quantitative skills of our undergraduates. A central question I’ve heard in both committees is how much calculus, probability and statistics an undergraduate college student should study. On this point, Harvey Mudd College mathematician Arthur Benjamin argued for [...]

May

6

Protesting Blackboard 8.0

May 6, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | 13 Comments

This post is being written in response to the unreliability of Blackboard 8.0—outages, slowness and bugs, oh my! Are we beta testing? Some didn’t realize how dependent we’ve become upon Blackboard until it went down for three consecutive days in mid March 2009.
As I hear rumors that Blackboard is likely to remain unreliable with periodic [...]

Apr

22

Who Put Your Exam on the Web?

April 22, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | 6 Comments

The year was 1997. During a graduate school take-home exam in abstract algebra, one of my fellow students emailed the questions to AskDrMath.com and received answers before the exam was due.
Fast forward to 2005. One of my international graduate students showed me a website hosted in his home country (in a language not based on [...]

Mar

29

Mentoring Graduate Students

March 29, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | Leave a Comment

Some of us mentor doctoral students. I had a positive experience as a student, but I understand from others that there can be a great deal of variance in the quality of the relationship from the points of view of both the professor and student. There’s apparently so much variance that the graduate student senate [...]

Mar

17

How elite are we?

March 17, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | 7 Comments

Did you see “Disadvantages of an Elite Education” (American Scholar, 2008) in which former Yale professor William Deresiewicz contrasts the education at Yale and Cleveland State, an inner-city university much like Baruch? The article was unexpectedly thought provoking. For example, consider this:
“[S]tudents at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so [...]

Mar

3

Why Post Grades on Blackboard?

March 3, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | 5 Comments

Did you see the article “Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes” by Max Roosevelt in the 18-Feb-2009 NY Times? The article asserts that students are feeling more entitled to high grades than in years past.
I made a small change about five years ago that significantly reduced the number of end-of-semester grade disputes. I wonder [...]

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