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 me, I’d like to share some of what I am hearing.

First, I asked young alumni as well as hiring managers who recruit Baruch’s BBA graduates.

They told me that to compete for the best entry-level professional positions, one needs spreadsheet fluency (some said that PowerPoint presentation skills and Access database skills are key too). And once on the job, according to Accountancy’s Harry Davis, young Excel and Access database “whiz kids” are receiving promotions earlier, especially at smaller firms where such skills are invaluable. Just yesterday someone told me that she perceives a double standard on Wall Street: all else being equal, Ivy League entry-level job candidates can say, “sure, I can learn MS-Excel visual basic macros” whereas a Baruch candidate would probably receive additional scrutiny over such statements.

Next, I surveyed our undergraduate BBA students (i.e., my MGT 3121 students.)

Students tell me that they want stand-alone courses in Excel modeling and they want Excel deeply embedded in business courses where it makes sense. I’ve heard this so many times that it motivated this article for my professional society’s monthly magazine.

Next, I asked Patricia Imbimbo and C. May Reilly at Baruch’s STARR Career Development Center.

They tell me that the need for spreadsheet and modeling skills are so great that they developed their own training program. The two-dozen or so students who qualify for the Financial Leadership Program (FLP; formerly called Wall Street Careers) receive three half-day Excel workshops on shortcuts, pivot tables, if statements, solver, vlookups and visual basic macro programming. In addition, Training the Street gives FLP participants additional modeling instruction. If our most promising graduates need such training, what does this say about the other 2000 BBAs who expect to graduate this year?

I asked my industry contacts at professional meetings.

They stress the importance of analytical thinking in business and the buzzword du jour: “business analytics.” Despite the current 26-year high in unemployment, analytics is a growth area. Consider this: IBM sees great promise in business analytics consulting. Tom Davenport’s 2006 Harvard Business Review article and subsequent book Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning are best sellers. The term analytics is so popular that INFORMS launched a new online magazine called Analytics. Professor Peter Bell at the Ivey School of Business gives other examples that include the end of the Boston Red Sox’s infamous post-season curse (e.g., see this 60 Minutes interview with Red Sox statistician Bill James). You sports junkies may enjoy the journal Interfaces “Analytics in Sports” special issue.

I asked colleagues at other business schools.

Some are leading the way with innovative new courses in spreadsheet modeling. Those that replace traditional course titles such as “quantitative models for management,” “management science,” or “decision models for management” with more contemporary titles such as “decision making with business analytics” or simply “business analytics” are realizing unprecedented class enrollments. Peter Bell tells me that the Ivey School doubled its MBA enrollments in a traditional management science course with some simple name changes (and careful attention to content). They’ve been so successful that the MBAs requested a follow-up class and faculty replicated the approach in the undergraduate curriculum. He wrote about some of these experiences here.

1. If the class discussion is a central part of learning with cases, what percent of a student’s course grade should be participation? How does one assess participation?
2. The answer to #1 at Harvard Business School (HBS) is 50%, based on quality and frequency of comments. Is such emphasis on class participation fair to all learning styles? How can we encourage involvement? (I like Leah Schanke’s answer posted on this blog in 2008.)
3. Some students will attempt to dominate case discussions while others will speak without adding value. How should we moderate?
4. How should students prepare for a case discussion? HBS’s answer is the “4 Ps” (preparation, presence, promptness, participation; see [1] for details). Do other models encourage as deep or deeper reflection?
5. Most cases are written about a situation faced 5 or 10 years ago. (a) Should we give students closure as to how the situation was actually resolved? (b) Should we (or the students?) report on the health of the company today? (c) Should we seek links between (a) and (b)?
6. How should one prepare to teach a case? Is preparation time-consuming?
7. HBS’s answer to #6 is this: read the case and teaching note and develop a set of specific teaching goals and have a clear idea of general topics and diagrams that you will lay out on the white board and prepare questions that encourage greater depth and analysis. (Source: [1], p. 3) This answer implies that the instructor leads the discussion. Are other debriefing models equally effective (e.g., student-led discussions, etc.)?
8. What is the “right” number of cases in an introductory class? (In [1], see p. 2, especially, “Because other techniques do other jobs well … use case discussions to accomplish what they can do better than other pedagogical methods.”)
9. Are case-intensive courses appropriate for full-time and part-time (evening) programs alike? Similarly, since our executive classes often meet in 3-hour blocks, are two case discussions per class effective?
10. Some colleges have set up case publishing divisions and teach all classes using the case method. For example, the Richard Ivey School of Business at the Univ. of Western Ontario is one such publisher; my colleagues at Ivey tell me that even their introductory undergraduate classes consist of about 30 case studies in 30 meetings. What’s more, Ivey promises its undergraduates the following compelling advantage: “Experiencing over 400 real world business cases in the HBA Program will give you the knowledge, skills and judgment to perform at an entirely different level when you enter the workforce. It’s a true simulation of the realities of business.” (source) Sounds great! But is this approach supported by pedagogical research, a desire to write and sell case studies, or both?
11. Are cases more effective than other innovative methods for creating “deep learning” such as games and simulations? (Panelist David Birdsell’s definition of case study includes games and simulations; however, since management simulations are often not based on real companies nor real data, I consider this a different instructional category.)
12. May we reuse a case next semester? Alternatively, should we rotate through a number of similar cases on a given topic so that any particular case is used once every 3-4 semesters? Regardless of frequency, is it OK to distribute your analysis of a case? (My opinion? See this post.) Finally, the analyses for many popular business case studies are now available “for hire” on the web (for example, see the disturbing hits on this Google search for one of my favorite cases). How do we contend with this?

Please ignore the above emphasis on business cases; that’s just what I know. Furthermore, I am in no way endorsing anything by HBS nor Ivey. I’m sure some of these will receive further reflection at the Oct 20^th and Nov 17^th sessions.

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[1] Shapiro, B.P. 1985. “Hints for Case Teaching.” Harvard Business School Publishing, case 9-585-012 (free to faculty; downloadable at hbsp.harvard.edu).

[2] Barnes, L.B., C.R. Christensen, A.J. Hansen. 1994. Teaching and the Case Method, Harvard Business Publishing, p. 41.

As most know, a study guide is a simple document that articulates what content you feel is important, describes what you will be assessing on the exam, and helps students focus their studying/review in the form of a checklist. When done right, the study guide is not “spoon feeding” nor teaching to a test, rather, a way of helping students define and prioritize what could be a seemingly boundless cloud of new material from the book, lectures notes, homework and other sources. It eliminates one of the causes of variance in exams scores—the students not knowing what’s covered.

Before every exam, I write about a page, usually in bullet form, which is posted on Blackboard. The last 10 minutes of the class prior to the exam is dedicated to discussing this guide.

I see the study guide as a contract that states the material to which I am committing on the exam, and from which I am not allowed to deviate too broadly when writing questions. For example, occasionally I write what I consider to be a “good” exam question that later must be vetoed upon consulting my study guide (”that just wouldn’t be fair”). From the students’ point of view, the study guide gives an opportunity to spend time preparing the “right stuff” and a chance to succeed on the exam. (Who doesn’t like to work hard and achieve something?)

With the students dialed in to what I want to assess on the exam, this permits me to write challenging (and often open-ended) questions that allow me to drill down to understand exactly what students do and do not know. But open-ended questions in assessment will be a topic for a future post.

Like most case study teaching notes, there is a recommended teaching plan. Immediately after suggesting that instructors ask, “Given what you know from the case, what would you recommend…?” Spear says, “Wait! Give students a chance to offer responses. Instructor silence is a powerful tool!”

If you read my 26-Nov-2008 post “Understanding ‘The Pause’,” hopefully Spear’s remark puts a smile on your face.

Spear offers other advice uncommon in most teaching notes. For example, he later suggests, “A key objective is to teach them [the students], through experience, to be specific both in terms of what they have observed and also in terms of what they would recommend. Therefore it is the responsibility of the instructor to challenge students.” And a little later in the lesson plan he advises, “Don’t let students off the hook. Whatever their response, ask…”

I appreciate these comments because case studies are hard work. They require significant student reading and digesting time as well as prep time on the part of the professor. However, when they work well, even exhausted executives have lively discussions at 8 pm at night. A little silence and challenge do go a long way.

(For those interested in learning more about the art of case teaching, please allow me to plug Baruch’s fall 2009 workshops.)

www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_s_formula_for_changing_math_education.html (3 minutes)

As I hear rumors that Blackboard is likely to remain unreliable with periodic outages, I’ve quietly been setting up workarounds so the show can go on. Below are some of my tricks; apologies for undoubtedly provoking the ire of some of my friends in corporate IT. And Kevin Wolff in BCTC, everyone says you are a miracle worker. Seriously. Thanks from all of us in the faculty.

Question 1: True or false? Baruch offers a service so you can post items on the web, even when Blackboard is down.

True!

Faculty can sign up for their own blog with Baruch’s Bernard L. Schwartz Communications Institute (the sponsors of this blog). The blogs are easily formatted to have the look and feel of a web page (example). Post away! (Another option is the eReserve.)

Question 2: True or false? When Blackboard is down and you want to post a giant file, you can send emails with large attachments (say, up to 1 gigabyte) for free?

True!

There are several free services—my favorites are www.dropsend.com (1 GB max) and www.YouSendIt.com (100 MB max). These services send an email to your recipients with a link to download the file.

Question 3: True or false? You can (easily) send an email to the entire class from your  baruch.cuny.edu email account even when Blackboard is down.

True!

The easiest way I know is via Gmail, though other email packages allow you to set up broadcast groups as well.

Step 1. Create a new Gmail email account (or use the one you already own).

Step 2. Download the class email list from the Baruch eRoster (select the “download roster” option and save as XLS file).

Step 3. Go to Gmail > Contacts > Export to download your contacts as a “Google CSV” file. This gives a nicely formatted Excel spreadsheet into which you copy-paste the names/emails you downloaded in step 2. Save as CSV format.

Step 4. Go to Gmail > Contacts > Import, and select the CSV file you updated in step 3. Be sure to check the box “Also add these imported contacts to new group.”

Now send an email to the group. As a bonus, Gmail allows attachments up to 20 MB in size. But wait, there’s more! Go to Gmail > Settings > Accounts > “Send Mail As”, and enter your baruch.cuny.edu email address. Even though you are emailing from gmail.com, students will see baruch.cuny.edu, and replies will go there too.

For those interested in other computer tricks, the following NY Times and WSJ articles may be helpful.

P.S. A week after I wrote the above, Dennis Slavin forwarded a note from Arthur Downing: “The BCTC has launched a new Blackboard status page that posts the current availability of the system along with the status messages received from CUNY: http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/blackboard “. There’s some good stuff here too.

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 the Roman alphabet, therefore not easily searched by most westerners). Students post homework, exams, and solutions for many North American universities, indexed by class and professor.

I was happy to see that the Wall Street Journal wrote about these issues in their 9-April-2009 article “Do Study Sites Make the Grade?” by A.M. Chaker, pp. D1-D2. [1] If you aren’t aware, online study sites give students access to homeworks and exams posted by hundreds of thousands of registered users. They are the old sorority/fraternity files in the Internet age. According to the article, solutions to 225 textbooks are also now on the web. Furthermore, students post and answer questions from fellow users around the globe.

According to Chaker, arguments for such sites include: “With the Internet, the sites say, it’s inevitable that all this information will be available to students anyway. It’s up to the schools, they say, to come to terms with modern times. ‘We’re just putting things out in the open,’ says Koofers’ Mr. Rihani, who says his site is making old tests previously accessible only to fraternity members, available to more students. Mr. Rihani notes that putting old tests online can help force more professors to refresh their old exams periodically. The study sites are likely to propel schools to rethink the way they teach.”

When NYU’s Aswath Damodaran spoke in our Master Teacher Series on 24-April-2007, we learned that he writes every exam from scratch and posts all old exams with solutions on his website. I think there’s evidence in the above article that more folks should consider Damodaran’s model, or at least rethink the way we embrace the technology.

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[1] If the link to the WSJ article does not give the full-text version, use this Google search instead.

“[S]tudents at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.

“That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy.”

It’s not that I agree with all the arguments in the essay, but Deresiewicz asks an important question: where do you fall on the spectrum of “indifferent” to “pampering”? The essay also gives one newfound appreciation for our students.

There was another recent attack on the elite colleges—Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Chris Hedges’ 9-Dec-2008 essay “The Best and the Brightest Have Led America Off a Cliff“—but skip it if you are looking for uplifting news.

If you want to read something more positive about elite colleges, consider Philip Delves Broughton’s Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School (Penguin Press, 2008; see the reviews that appeared in The New York Times, Business Week and The Economist). I especially recommend the book to my colleagues in the Zicklin School. Broughton shares several positive aspects of the HBS MBA, especially the way it trained him to think and noteworthy classes and professors. But if you keep reading, sure enough, more critique. For example, the last chapter (”A Factory for Unhappy People”) lines up closely with Deresiewicz and Hedges. His comments “If I were dean for a day…” (pp. 277-280) are particularly interesting:

“I would change the mission statement. HBS does not need to promise to ‘educate leaders who make a difference in the world.’ It suggests that business, with its priorities and decision-making approach, has a right to impose its will on the world. But business needs to relearn its limits, and if the HBS let some air out of its own balloon, business would listen. HBS need only promise to educate students in the process and management of business. It would be a noble and accommodating goal and would dilute the perception of the school and its graduates as a megalomaniacal, self-sustaining elite. … Harvard can stop saying it ‘transforms’ students, as if it has a lifelong claim on them.”

(Special thanks to Professor Mano Singham, Case Western Reserve Univ. for bringing the first two articles to my attention.)

I made a small change about five years ago that significantly reduced the number of end-of-semester grade disputes. I wonder how many of my colleagues do the same. It’s simple: after every graded assignment—homework, quiz, project, exam, presentation, whatever—post the student grades on Blackboard (see the “Grade Center” in Blackboard 8.0’s control panel, formerly called “Gradebook” in version 7.0).

At all times during the semester, students can check their running tally. And they do. The C and B students who would otherwise fight at the end of the semester now know where they stand from day 1. Rather than holding a discussion at the end of the term, we talk about how the student can meet my standards months earlier.

I know students can keep their own running tally as we hand back every graded assignment—they don’t need Blackboard for this information. But by posting their grades, we communicate transparently our understanding of their performance, as well as any assignments that are missing. In addition to the student’s individual scores, the student also sees class statistics (mean, std. dev., high, low, etc.). It’s also a good “quality inspection” to eliminate grade book errors. (What, you never entered an 87% as a 78%?).

There are some downsides. First, it takes five or ten extra minutes per assignment to upload a grade spreadsheet into Blackboard, and entering the grades directly into the Blackboard grade book is not much better due to a gludgy interface. Second, some students obsess about their grades resulting in two issues: being hounded with emails 48 hours after an assignment was collected (where’s my grade?), and an apparent gradebook-checking obsession among some (if only they would dedicate as much energy to the readings).