04.02.07 postmortem

Folks that have worked with me back home will recall that I'm a fan of the post-mortem... a little analysis of a project after it wraps up. The main idea is that it's a good way to note what works and what doesn't, because it's easy to forget as you move on to the next project. So, for the benefit of prospective SBS MBAs, a few of which read this blog, I thought I would go over my first term scores and give a few thoughts on these. But first, a couple of basics:

UK Grading System - Andy, my British buddy has gone over this before, but the simple version is as follows. Grades are 40% - 80%, but the vast majority of MBA scores fall between 50% and 70%. Roughly, a 50% is a C, a 60% is a B and a 70% is an A. There really aren't D's, just fails for 49% and below. No one ever ever gets a 90% or 100%, tests just aren't written that way. The only way to get a 0% is to turn in nothing or plagiarise. A booger on a piece of paper would get you a 40%. There are fancy UK terms for each level of this, but that's not important here.

My approach to grades - as long as I get 50.000001%, have fun, learn stuff, meet cool people, and get an MBA that says "Oxford" on it, I am cool.

Practical Work - this is papers, essays, projects, everything BUT exams

Exam - this one small thing means the same in the UK as the US... savor it

Weighting - generally, exams are 60% of the grade and practical work is 40%, sometimes it's 50/50.

Ok. As Aman would say, I now open the kimono (that expression still makes my stomach turn a little)...

Decision Science (aka Statistics); Practical: 66, Exam: 74, Overall: 71 (distinction!)

Interpretation: it's possible for a math idiot like me to work really really hard and do well on a difficult subject. I focused a lot of energy on this, and it paid off. Unfortunately, subjects which come more easily to me were neglected in favour of DS, and they suffered. Also, I should point out that I took a community college stats class before I came here, and it helped me to understand the basics, but I must stress: only a very very little bit.

Developing Effective Managers; Practical: 52, Exam: 61, Overall: 57

Interpretation: if your group isn't good at writing DEM papers (for whatever reason), you're screwed, plus: grading is wishy washy. This course is sort of a soft science, really a lot like my Psychology undergrad. All the work is case reading and then paper writing. No concept took me more time to understand than it took to read. There were a lot of concepts, but still all were pretty easy. The difficult part was that most of the practical work was group work, and that means "essay writing by committee". What a cluster fuck this was. 5 over concerned, hyper involved people arguing ad naseum, and 1 person who basically did nothing. The free rider was, quite frankly a relief because they reduced the amount of churn on any given project by 1 person's worth. Despite all the work, we simply failed to grasp the basic concept of DEM writing: they want you to combine two theories from the reading and show why each applies and doesn't apply to the case. I didn't get this until the end, and suffered for it. They also don't want you to write about the theories in the articles, the theories given in the book are what they're looking for. My professor (a great guy), was totally unable to communicate this to me, and his TA was unwilling to discuss it with me. So, despite meeting with him after every single lousy essay score came back, I never really got what he was looking for until the very end. I would add that many of my classmates with better scores never really understood what the hell he was looking for either (they will tell you this quite adamantly), even though they got better scores. Oh yeah, and one other thing: worrying about good grammar, sentence structure, etc., is a WASTE OF TIME. They don't care. This is an international program, and most of the writing, from a US high school, or US undergrad writing "quality" perspective, is shit. But it doesn't matter, they want the theoretical content, not perfect east coast US English grammar. Myself and the other North American in our group wasted endless hours editing for lousy grammar, and it gained us zero. In some ways, I think that it's worse here to have a native English speaker do the editing, because then you're focused on details outside of the content. I also have personal conspiracy theory going that "proper English" in a paper flags you for a more critical review, but that's totally unsubstantiated.

Finance 1: Practical; 69, Exam: 64, Overall: 66

Interpretation: even a math idiot like me can work his ass off and rock in Finance 1. Finance is the big gnarly hardcore subject that gives everyone the willies. This is concerned with beta and sigma and option pricing and other such scary financial world mumbo jumbo. I knew DICK about this, and it was difficult. I spent endless hours in the prof's office hours (by the way, what an excellent guy, he took so much time for me, and was so concerned about me doing well, he really deserves a medal), worked problems constantly, never missed a class, and even got up at 2AM the day of the test to work finance problems to warm up... I worked them all way up to the exam at 11AM. Like DS, I focused a lot on this, and courses like DEM and Strategy suffered. I have to say that I was thrilled to get a 66 here!

Financial Reporting; Practical: 61, Exam: 65, Overall: 63

Interpretation: Previous accounting classes are probably NOT helpful, but don't worry, the curve will save you! I took a community college accounting class before I came, so that I wouldn't be so overwhelmed by the course here. In hindsight, this was probably not a good use of my time. The course I took back home was really focused on understanding double entry bookkeeping, ledgers, balancing accounts, etc. It was also very prescriptive: you do X in situation 1, and Y in situation 2. The professors here are not into that. Because of the international nature of the program (again), they show you all sorts of ways that different countries do things differently, different ways of accounting for this and that, and there's so much information that it's really not possible to learn it all. Further, they are very much more concerned with the interpretation of accounting than with the doing of accounting, especially dodgy accounting. I think it's only fair to point out that we had 3 different instructors over 8 weeks, read what you like from that. The head prof is very famous internationally, and gets to meet with all sorts of heads of state, international captains of industry, and is even presenting a proposal for an "alternate", environmental sustainability focused accounting system to the Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister. Heady stuff! I honestly got the feeling that his mind was elsewhere. He made a big point of teaching us about "goodwill", an accounting concept involving bookkeeping for companies that own or are owned by other companies. Apparently they don't teach this at Harvard or Wharton because it's considered to be too advanced for first term MBA students. What's the point of teaching us this, then? Proving to profs at other schools that Oxford students are better than their students? It just seems a bit more focused on the prof than the students. I know that I did a fairly crappy job on the exam, at best deserving a 40 or 50. Pure luck could have netted me a 60, but I got a 65. Obviously the curve saved me.

Managerial Economics; Practical: 68, Exam: 53, Overall: 60

Interpretation: don't write "funny" essays. This one is pretty simple. While the subject matter was totally new to me, it was also very interesting and I really felt like I "got" it. Our practical work was a micro economic analysis of the credit card industry from a card services network and card issuer perspective. Pretty interesting stuff, really. It was also pretty hard to do, and I think we got a fair grade for it. The test was made up of two parts: some short answer questions and an essay. I knew all the answers very well, and felt that I rocked all the short answers. I then picked a subject for the essay that I knew really well, and decided to write a "humorous" essay... maybe getting a few extra points for facility with the subject. BAD IDEA. I totally got spanked on this test, and it could only have been for my essay. It kind of sucks, because I came out of this exam feeling like I'd finally had a "really good" one. So kids, stick to the straight and narrow when writing essays. Of course, maybe it's just my generally shitty essay writing?

Strategy: Practical; 62, Exam: 59, Overall: 60

Interpretation: all nighters are a bad idea at age 37. I used to do this back in my undergrad, and it worked just fine. Not so at age 37. With this class, most of the concepts are pretty easy, and you just have to remember a bunch of lists of stuff. I sort of blew off studying for this to get my statistics and finance acts together. I put in a day studying early in revision, and then started late the night before the exam. When I realised it was 3:30 AM, I thought, "I'll just stay up all night" and get some more studying in. This was a really bad idea. The combination of a) thinking I may have made a mistake by staying up so late, b) huge amounts of caffeine, and c) lack of sleep all conspired to make me really jumpy, unable to focus, and unable to remember my theories. Apparently I looked pretty insane at the test... pacing around outside muttering to myself, checking my notes cards, pacing more, slapping my forehead, and whatever else. When I sat the exam I misunderstood the proctors and thought that it was a 3 question, 1.5 hour exam. I spent 30 minutes finishing the first question, and the proctor announced "30 minutes remaining". So, I had to cram my last two into 15 minutes each. My second two essays had weaker arguments, to say the least. If I had just gotten a decent night's sleep, this would have gone much better. Our study group, which was pretty lousy at DEM papers, actually was better at Strategy papers, so the practical work component was a bit better, but not great.

So, there you have it. I'm actually quite happy with my grades, though it would of course be nice to have better ones. But, I bet that the future students who read this blog will find this to be an OK source of info about what exam are really like. Enjoy!

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