Three recent articles on Poets & Quants caught my eye:
– ‘AI IS DEVALUING THE MBA’: Stanford Students Speak Out On Curriculum Lag & Risk To The B-School’s Brand.
– ‘WE EXPECTED MORE’: Stanford GSB Students Call For Higher Teaching Standards.
– ‘WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics.
These articles are partly about Stanford and partly about the MBA. But they are all about change and the response to change.
For me, the most surprising finding was that professors send “Room Temp” lists alerting students they will call on in class the next day. One Stanford student explained what that does: “It teaches them that they don’t have to read or prepare before class if they’re not on the list.”
I went to a different b-school at a different time and can’t imagine the situation in those articles. But I also get that profs react to situations where both students and administrations may not support having standards.
Some situations I experienced in b-school:
One stats prof was known as the angry guy. One day he went down the row cold calling students:
“What’s Benford’s Law?”
“Uh…”
“It’s in the textbook!” To the next student: “What’s Benford’s Law?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You didn’t do the reading!” Next student: “What’s Benford’s Law?!”
“I don’t know.”
“You gotta read the textbook! Why didn’t anyone read it?!” he screamed.
But that same prof had us hand calculate each step of a linear regression – something that Excel does instantly. And if you’ve never done it you might have no idea what a regression is and what Excel actually does.
In a popular class with 300 students, there was no “Room Temp” list, but the prof would start by calling five names. If your name was called you were presenting the case, no matter what. When the names were called, everyone else would let out a sigh of relief.
I saw people stand for 45 minutes being grilled on particulars they seemed to know well at the start of the hour.
One time as a student made his case the prof stopped him: “See this guy? He’s going to be an investment banker. At some point you’ll meet someone like this. They will throw you under the bus and expect you to thank them.” Everybody laughed (and nobody complained to the administration).
As it did a generation ago, the MBA will be reinvented again. The previous reinvention moved away from the expectation students would take stable corporate jobs. The current reinvention could be about attitudes/standards and AI.
Is some of the situation in the above articles about the slowness to adapt class material? For the last 2.5 years I’ve required AI in my classes. But that also means that you need to change the class itself. If you just tack on AI to an old course it won’t really work.
Or is some of the Stanford situation what comes to the surface in a time of high unemployment for recent MBA grads? Was the situation there earlier but ignored when job prospects were better?
So many ways to learn today.