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Tag Archives: grades
On Grades
It is a common trope here at business school that grades don’t matter.
Judging from the amount of hours that most students put in at the library, one might assume that this maxim is some sort of game theory-driven bluff to fool the meek and gullible away from the battlefield. For those of us who have spent a lifetime in a system that rewards only grades as a gauge of learning, in some cases fostering the perverse incentive to take easier and less challenging courses, it can be hard to break old habits.
But in business school, grades should not drive your course selection. Don’t opt out of Corporate Valuation or Derivatives if you’re concerned it will hurt your GPA, even if you consider yourself more of a “soft skills” person. This is your chance to learn this material from industry experts. For most of us, business school is an educational safety net in addition to a career reset button. It serves as a last chance to learn dense academic material in a “safe” setting. After this, almost all of our learning is “on the job,” meaning the ramifications of mistakes are a lot more dire than a poor grade.
Posted in Clark Bosslet '12, Graduate Life Tagged business school, grades, mba, vanderbilt Leave a comment
What’s in a Grade?
So now
that Mod 2 is done… it’s time for grades. Who cares… this is grad school,
right? I thought that grades weren’t supposed to matter. (somewhere in New
Hampshire my parents are crying) Yet every time grades are issued, the same questions
pop up, the same issues are raised, and the same complaints are aired.
I have
had professors comment on the fixation that our class (2010) has on our grades.
Not so much that we “Grade Grub”, but that we generally worry about our scores
too much, as though we were undergrads. Some have asked “Why do we care?” … “Most
of the companies do not use it as a measure of employability.”
This question has been posed by most
of my professors… and of course when this conversation starts, someone always
chimes in “If grades don’t matter, then I’ll take an SP, thank you.” (I try to
be first, just in case they say yes… SP is the Owen version of a 4.0 / A ) It IS
true that most disciplines don’t ask to see a GPA. (Finance is the exception.)
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged dores, duke, finance, grade grub, grades, harvard, healthcare, hop, mba, owen, owenbloggers, vadnerbilt, vanderbilt 1 Comment
Process Flow Diagram
So I am sitting downstairs in the quicksand chairs that Owen has strewn about
the first floor. (see pic) 
Actually,
they are organized neatly, but since I don’t like these chairs much, I thought
I would talk some trash. I have a break. It seldom happens that I get a break…
students here are always busy. I would love to get one of those stop motion
cams to snap a photo of the second floor every 30 seconds. Start at 8am, end at
2am. Watch the students shuffle in, shuffle out, sit down, stand up, fall
asleep, and generally work their butts off.
Break time, means looking at my task list. It is ever changing. I have my class
work timed to flag on the list when its coming due, then there are replies,
thank you letters, blog posts, even calls to family, so I don’t let it go by
for too long. The list is always moving… in one task, out another. This reminds
me of the current class I am in… Operations!
(said with an energetic Dutch accent, if you are lucky enough to have Lepre)
It’s Exciting!
Tagged dores, finance, grades, healthcare, hop, mba, operations, owen, owenbloggers, process flow diagram, vadnerbilt, vanderbilt Leave a comment