Archive for October, 2007

Weekly Schedule

Published on October 22, 2007. 2 Comments

Most Darden Students have a busy schedule, although frequently as a personal choice. To provide some perspective on the typical week of a first year student, I have included my schedule from the week of October 1st.

First Quarter Student Schedule

There are four main components to a Darden student schedule:

Classes (red) – Can be held up to 5 days per week and 3 classes per day, but usually there are only around 12 classes per week. Classes also require case preparation, which isn’t captured on my schedule above.

Learning Team (blue) – Generally meets every evening when there is class the next day. For our Monday classes we try to hold our learning team meeting on Friday. With my schedule above, there are 5 learning team meetings shown compared with 4 days of class because we did not hold a team meeting on the previous Friday.

Career Development (yellow)– How much time you spend on career development is a personal choice, although most first year students spend a handful of hours each week between briefings, networking events, and eventually interviews.

Social / Other (green) – Purely optional activities including social events, leadership speaker series, case competitions, and section sports competitions. The level of involvement in this area varies significantly between students.

Breakdown of my time for the week of October 1st:

Activitiy Hours
Classes 18
Case Preperation 12
Learning Team 10
Career Development 6
Subtotal 46
Social / Other 20
Grand Total 66

In summary, the formal Darden curriculum and career development accounted for 46 hours of my week – a similar time commitment to a standard 40 hour work week. For me, the additional social and development activities consumed a significant amount of time, although I’m counting playing soccer on a Saturday and having dinner my wife and another couple in this category.

Case Method

Published on October 10, 2007. 4 Comments

The virtually 100% case based learning is a clear differentiator for Darden. However, if you ask former business school students what they think about a 100% case based approach you will get two responses. From my experience, people that attended the 100% case based schools think it’s the best way to learn, and people that attended mixed schools (case and lecture) think a mixed approach is best. Here are my thoughts on how you can reconcile these two views:

1. Not all case based learning is the same. The level of case preparation seems to be much higher at Darden than mixed schools. My friends who attended mixed method schools recall that ‘cases are great because you can do well by skimming the case 60 minutes before class.’ At Darden, if you only skim the case you will not pass! Most classes at Darden start with the professor selecting a student at random (termed the “cold call”) to present their analysis. In an accounting class, this analysis may be very complicated and include identifying cost drivers and reallocating each indirect cost to make a product decision. On average I spend 1.5 hours preparing each case on my own and then another 1 hour reviewing the case with my learning team. After these 2.5 hours of preparation, I’ve already learned most of the concepts from the case. The case discussion is then used to validate my approach, understand other student’s perspectives, and learn how to explain my approach and the case concepts to other students. Learning how to articulate and explain concepts in easy to understand language has been a huge advantage of the Darden program.

2. The Professor makes a big difference. Teaching with the case method requires a different style of thinking. When giving a lecture, a professor presents concepts in a one directional and often highly technical broadcast format. In contrast, when teaching with the case method, students come to class already familiar with the concept from technical notes and have already analyzed a business situation using the concept. The professor’s responsibility is then to facilitate a discussion that addresses student questions regarding the concept’s application. Specifically, the professor needs the students who “get it” to explain the concept to students who haven’t yet grasped the concept. This is often a very difficult task for professors who spend much of their time focused on highly specific or technical research (i.e. proving the superiority of a new commodity pricing equation). These professors would find it natural to present a concept’s proof (via lecture), but have a hard time explaining the concept in easy to understand terms. In contract, my best case discussion professor’s have quickly learn each student’s strengths and strategically select which student to call on in order to keep the discussion on track.

3. Accounting is a great class for the case method. Most applicants that visit Darden ask how accounting can be effectively taught with the case method. To address this question, I consider two dimensions of the course topic – 1) number of acceptable case solutions, and 2) average student comprehension level. For financial accounting the number of acceptable solutions is relatively low, leading to the reaction that accounting would be best taught with a lecture. However, after reading a chapter in the financial accounting textbook, preparing a case, and then reviewing the case in learning team, the average student comprehension level coming into a case discussion is very high. This means that during the class discussion there are literally 55 students ready to explain a financial accounting rule to the 5 students that don’t yet understand. We usually start class by having several students’ complete different portions of the case on transparencies. Then class is conducted by sequentially presenting the transparencies and having students ask questions where clarification is needed. Our professor generally defers all questions to the student who presented the transparency and only steps in when we get stuck as a class.