The Meaning(lessness) of Grades

Coming to McCombs for my MBA, I made a personal decision to significantly reduce the importance I place on my grades and instead focus on learning the material.  In a perfect world, knowledge of material would perfectly correlate with grades.  The overall smartest would get the highest grade all the way down to the least smart.  But we all know people who deviate both ways from this perfect correlation, sometimes due to their own abilities or difficulties, and other times due to the professors and their tests.

First, the student.  One student may know the material like the back of his hand and end up helping prep his classmates for exams, but come exam time, get stressed and do worse than he should.  Of course there could be others who perform above their expectation, but I find that to be less common in my own experiences.

What about the professors?  I think at this point in our academic histories we have all seen the professors who come up with ridiculously complex or ambiguous test structures or questions that don't test knowledge, but test students' test-taking abilities. 

Put these two factors together and you get some situations where the smartest may not rank at the top of the class, and some less knowledgeable students break through to the top.  I don't think anyone should resent this - after all, it's like comparing college football's BCS rankings (for grades, the "perfect world"...hah I just called the BCS "perfect") to any other sport's playoff system (for grades, the real world).  Ultimately students have to perform against the evaluation structure that is set up for them.  But I do think it's a choice every MBA student has to make coming into their programs - am I going to focus more on the grades or the content?

During my time at Michigan, the students with the best experience, personality in the interview, and communication skills generally landed almost all the most prestigious and desired internships and full-time offers.   These attributes don't always correlate with GPA (some people who got those jobs didn't even put their GPAs on their resumes).  Their results were a big part of my decision to focus on other aspects of the MBA program beyond grades.

Fortunately, schools attempt to mitigate individual focus on grades and encourage collaboration through three different policies that I'm guessing all MBA programs use at least one of:

1. Grade Non-Disclosure: Everyone receives a GPA, but during recruiting, students are not allowed to disclose their GPA to on-campus employers.
2. Changing the Grade Scale: Ditching the traditional A/B/C/D/F system and reverting to elementary school-like grading of "high pass," "pass," and "low pass" (or some other similar variation).  Another variation is to use letter grades but eliminate +s and -s.
3. Modifying the Grading Curve/"Grade Inflation": Stick with As, Bs, Cs, etc. but adjust how many students receive each, usually allowing the bell curve to peak around a B+ and have very few get less than a B-.

Classes at McCombs generally use #3, and some professors have said things like, "You have to really try to get less than a B-."  I'm fine with how McCombs structures its grading curves, and I think it helps further encourage already nice, collaborative students to help each other along, especially through the sometimes difficult first semester core classes.

Ideally I think all schools should adopt #1 in conjunction with #2 or #3, as #1 has no effect on anything other than not allowing students to disclose grades during on-campus recruiting.  If Stanford can do it, I think others can too.  But implementing at least one of the three is very important in the overall MBA learning experience.

The Storm Before the Storm

When I started this blog I promised myself it wouldn't consist of boring factual updates with nothing insightful to say.  That's what facebook is for.  But two weeks into orientation and pre-term classes with 12+ hour days and a lot of networking, I'm breaking my own rule in lieu of letting Wolverhorn slip into the Blogger graveyard.  I won't let this happen often.

Orientation started August 2 with a packed schedule of activities on top of trying to learn 261 new names (and personally trying to fight off a nasty cold).  I think all of us were pretty exhausted by the end of the week after having full days of lectures and group activities followed by McCombs-sanctioned night activities (usually followed by more "non-McCombs-sanctioned activities").  Some highlights were:

• Monday night: Dinner reception at the Red McCombs Red Zone at Texas Memorial Stadium.  It's the section of suites in the football stadium financed largely by Red McCombs (who donated $50 million to the bschool 10 years ago, founded Clear Channel, is the main investor in Austin's new Formula 1 race track, basically owns Austin, etc.).  The man/myth/legend/super-investor Red McCombs himself spoke to us before dinner.
  
  
• Tuesday night: Students from all six UT MBA programs (executive education, Houston and Dallas, etc.) convened in Austin.  I had a chance to meet students from the other programs (and more in my own program).  Dean Gilligan spoke to us during dinner.
  
  
• Thursday afternoon: In pairs of study group teams, students competed in an online business simulation.  Each person was assigned a different role and had different responsibilities to manage a computer manufacturing company.  It was by far the most ridiculously complex simulation I've ever seen or heard of, but we had a blast.  We killed some imaginary employees in a hurricane and lost a lot of money, but the winner was chosen based on the quality of a presentation to hypothetical VC firm, which we won for our cohort!  So our team picture will be posted on the Carpenter Center wall for future classes to worship see.
  
  
• Friday: We spent the day outside in 100 degree heat doing more team building activities on the Colorado River.  Fortunately one was rafting down it so pretty much all of us jumped in to cool off.  

The week of August 9 was full of pre-term classes to get the academic ball rolling.  We had more fun stuff scheduled during a few of the evenings:

• Tuesday night: Cohort games at Zilker Park.  Much like the BBA games at Michigan, each cohort competed in four events (beer drinking was not an official event) for the Cohort Cup.  Historically, my cohort is known for...how do I put this...its propensity to choose beer over bragging rights.  But we put up a fight, and if not for getting shafted by the judges on the wheelbarrow race, would have tied for 1st.  We also had an epic "Rudy" moment with one of our cohort mates in dodgeball that propelled us to the win.
  
  
• Thursday night: We made the trip to the Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood for some pretty amazing Texas BBQ.  After dinner, one of the most epic dance circles I've ever seen broke out, led by our unofficial fearless cohort leader Carlos.  Beer and wine flowed, 80s and MJ started playing, and things got a bit nuts.

This week classes are in full swing.  Hopefully more insightful posts to come! 

Until then,