Thursday, April 14, 2011

Business as usual

The Default Major - Skating Through B-School - NYTimes.com:

Diploma mills for slackers?

Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college on a national test of writing and reasoning skills. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than students in every other major.
That last bit kills me and is worth repeating: "... they score lower than students in every other major." Every. Other. Major.

I immediately thought of Inside Job upon reading this article.

On a tangential note, I participated in a research study last night with some marketing folks from a firm doing research for a television network I won't disclose. Their questions were mostly about how did we, as guys, define "being a man," our relationships with our fathers, what kind of TV we watched, talked about amongst each other, and what it was about those shows that held our interest. At the end of the study, it turned out I had been bad-mouthing the network that had hired their firm any time the discussion of that network or its shows came up. The folks running the study chuckled, "Yeah, the network you said is 'for morons,' that's us." I calls 'em, like I sees 'em.
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