Right Wing Nation

Our course is case based. Using a case provides a context for students to work within, allows us to emulate a work environment (it’s a business school, after all), and allows us to integrate the different skills we teach over the course of the semester.

The case is some sort of work scenario, where students are given tasks. These tasks — student projects — fall into two categories: individual and group projects.

We have written exams and practical exams, midterm and final. A practical exam is when students are given the exam and a flashdrive with files on it, and have to work the problems in a computer cluster.

Each component of the course corresponds to a skillset, and culminates in a project. This means, of course, that students know which skillset to use for each of these projects. But there is also a final integrated project, which requires the use of all the skillsets. Students are not told in the final project which skillset to use for which part, and since the skillsets are presented in class in order of complexity and not in the order in which they would be used together in the real world, the groups must break the integrated project into discrete problems, decide on the most logical order to tackle these problems, and solve them (there is one exception to this: Students are told in the project instructions that they must create a deterministic model in Excel that models their analysis, so the “business” can choose different values for different variables and see how the outcome is affected).

As an example, we cover optimizations before we do simulations, because optimizations are far more straightforward and far less complex. Simulations require more abstract thought (the simulated data aren’t real, after all), and interpreting the results requires statistical analysis. In an integrated project, however, the simulation will nearly always feed the optimization, that is, students will have to set up and run a simulation to get the ideal value or value range for a variable. They will then have to set up an optimization, plug in the value range for the variable from the simulation, and run it.

We do tell students that they will use all the skills we’ve covered in the integrated project. We do not, however, break the integrated project into individual problems, nor do we tell them how the problems are interrelated.

This is a 200-level course.

We cover some (comparatively) simple skillsets, such as descriptive stats and creating deterministic models in Excel. We also cover complex skillsets, such as simulations. Trust me when I saw that we do not have time to do the cartesian geometry students should have done in first-year algebra but for whatever reason did not. All we can do is present the material, throw open our office doors for hysterical students, encourage them to get all the help they can from us, our teaching assistants or other students, and hope they do well.