Transfer wants to change major

bernie12
Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:51:44 +0000

It depends on who you take for 111 I think. Some of them are indeed very easy (I took one who was, he sucked though). Also, I believe 119 goes into more Calc. 2 oriented things.

Are you sure? I would argue that some of those classes are perhaps harder than some of the econ. classes but I question how much harder they are than say econometrics which has been known to yield 60 something averages on exams (plus I think they may have had a workload) or some other classes in the college. Does the b-school have any such classes. Also, various research studies regarding amount of time dedicated to studying/academic work among US undergraduates indicates that out of: business, engineering, science, social science, “letters” (humanities), that business students study the least. This applies to either 2003 or 2006 (I forget). Note that students rated themselves this way. Then the businessweek rankings came out and revealed that Goizueta students apparently did 15.7 hours of work outside of class (that seems low to me as a science major and as a person who has taken several social science courses). Weird enough, this was the high end of schools (as in, it put it in the top 10) and a higher ranked school such as the one at Notre Dame only had 14 or hours.

So while I think there is work associated w/the B-School it is only perhaps above average business majors in the US (about 13 hours), but not the rest of the college (it’s either lower or the same as say the social sciences). Admittedly, the humanities comes close. Humanities majors were, to my surprise, rated closer to science majors than one would expect. That’s probably because they have a significant amount of reading and writing assignments. Also, they may have more courses taught in a non-traditional manner that incur a fairly heavy workload from week to week. Note that the study was emphasizing the declining study/academic dedication of students and that the gaps actually seemed larger than when we studied more. Over time, they appear to have converged closer to the same point (all at lower ends than before). Not only this, but elite/selective research institutions and LACs (these students studied the most as expected) had perhaps only marginally higher study times from others, so I would guess that the comparison across disciplines still applies to elite schools except that at many, the bars are moved a little higher for each one.

The only thing that really got me about the 15.7hr number is the fact that I thought B-School students took 5-6 classes a semester as a standard load. Perhaps the assignments are a bit more straightforward (though somewhat time consuming) than in many of the college classes. For example, I heard that the marketing project last spring was annoying (saw my friends working on it a lot). However, up until then (as in fall semester), I never really saw them stressed. Maybe only a couple of classes push those buttons. The relatively soft grading curve may also contribute (the fact that you are graded on a strict distribution means that you are competing against each other and not a set of standards set by the prof. meaning that everybody in a class they don’t like or feels is difficult can buck the system and do poorly and have those grades distributed, or in another class, people will do extremely well and have good grades distributed), though it sucks when there is a really easy class, with easy exams, meaning you must score very high to get an A (like when it is so easy, that 97=A-). However, whether such a class is that easy is almost out of ones control and the difference between 97 and 100 is probably a careless error or a sudden lapse in memory during the exam and thus doesn’t mean, you should just study a lot more. Even then, selective institutions only average about 17.5hrs a week (among all disciplines I guess, as in averaged together).