MBA Quant Experience

Mendoza School of Business at the University of Notre Dame purchased MBA Math subscriptions for all incoming one year and two year program students for the second year.

Here is a testimonial from Amos Peverill, a first-year student at Pamplin School of Business at Virginia Tech and member of the MBA Math Board of Advisors, about his pre-MBA use of the MBA Math online quantitative preparation course:

After years of bumping the glass ceiling, I started planning on going back to school for an MBA, but, when I saw what was about to happen to our economy, I decided to move the plan up to immediate status. This is a great time to be retooling and investing in your mind, especially if you come from a finance or real estate related business, and that certainly includes me.

I’ve been in the realm of commercial real estate for awhile, so TVM calculations were not unfamiliar, but the MBA Math program was a great tool for revisiting the core quant areas that I’ve been using this year at the Pamplin Business College at Virginia Tech. Pamplin’s program is strong on the quantitative side, particularly for a finance concentration, so I would rate MBA Math as an important investment in my success so far. I finished my first semester with a 3.94 GPA while carrying an overload of courses, and I found it really helped to get a running start by revisiting the concepts in a very targeted fashion.

Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis purchased MBA Math subscriptions for all incoming students for the third year.

Here is a testimonial from Michael Shannon, a first-year student at Mendoza College of Business School at the University of Notre Dame and member of the MBA Math Board of Advisors, about his pre-MBA use of the MBA Math online quantitative preparation course:

I am a first year student at the University of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business. I hold an undergraduate degree from Miami University of Ohio where I majored in English Literature. To say that an MBA degree is a bit different from an English background is an understatement. However, I have found that the communication skills that are developed as a liberal arts student have proven to be an asset. Before I came to Notre Dame, I worked for a greeting card company as a sales manager. I currently am concentrating in the marketing and consulting business areas, where I hope to pursue a career in this area.

Not having the quantitative background, I needed a primer before I immersed myself in business school. MBA Math proved to be quite valuable as a way to get a head start. Excel, balance sheets, and equity were all foreign terms that I needed to master rather quickly at ND, and MBA Math certainly reviews these topics thoroughly.

Like many business schools, Notre Dame is no different in that it will challenge you in ways that are unheard of as an undergraduate, or the "real world" for that matter. Once your orientation begins, prepare to be overwelmed. MBA Math helped me to get the fundamentals down, which were vital to my success. I stand behind MBA Math, and encourage you to try it.

MBA Math student transcript requests are high this time of year as applicants work to improve the quant dimension of their MBA applications.  Most requests come from students submitting a transcript on their own initiative but some students report admissions officers have encouraged them to complete the course. 

In one recent case, a candidate was offered admission to a top 5 MBA program contingent on completing the course with a high proficiency.  One intense week later, the student completed the course, we submitted the transcript, and the acceptance was official.

Interactions with a leading MBA program revising its core curriculum and pre-term quantitative skills prep crystallized the following recommendations for MBA administrators, which might also be of interest to prospective students:

In my opinion, the best practice for online-only quant prep is to set a proficiency threshold for all MBA Math lessons, excepting only those topics not needed for a given program (e.g., calculus for marginal analysis in econ). The top third can breeze through the lesson-specific quizzes, digging into the learning material only when they encounter proficiency gaps. The bottom third can start from scratch with the narrated lectures, proceeding to drill exercises and detailed solutions, and continuing to post-quizzes only when ready. The middle third can use pre-quizzes as diagnostics to determine their path through each lesson.

My recommended best practice for blending online pre-work with live workshops is to designate a core subset of MBA Math lessons as required with the rest optional, design live workshops to build on the mandatory online lessons, and restrict live workshop attendance to the bottom third, directing other students to use the optional online lessons as needed. Requiring some online pre-work of all students helps those who confuse familiarity with proficiency to realize their mistake while time remains to take corrective action before arriving on campus.

I taught the 5-day quant skills course at Dartmouth's Tuck School to 70 incoming first years in late August.  This was the ninth year of being students' first Tuck professor, trying to set a good example for those that will follow.  I tinkered with the syllabus, using last year's student and TA feedback to prune out some material and make room for some additional accounting coverage and a closing session on the ongoing credit crisis that connected back to much of what students learned during the week.

Five second-year TAs dove in to ease the new students into Tuck.

I was in Ithaca, New York in early August to teach a 3-day Quantitative Skills Course for about 80 incoming first years of Cornell's Johnson School.  We covered topics in finance, economics, marketing, and accounting.  The coverage was better tuned to Johnson's core courses than my first effort last year.  Also, students did online pre-work at mbamath.com for certain basic topics, thereby allowing us to proceed deeper into the subjects in the classroom.

As usual, the students were bonding as they were learning, settling into Ithaca and getting to know their way around campus and town.  Ithaca still had a sleepy summer feeling at that point in August and the students had the Johnson staff in Sage Hall to themselves before the arrival of the rest of the class for orientation week.  Two second-year TAs helped to put the incoming students at ease as they prepared for the first year core courses.

Back in late June in New York City at the Forté Foundation MBA Women's Conference, I opened my morning quant skills workshop by telling the 90+ participating women, all admitted to Forté sponsoring schools, that they should understand the quantitative basics of the ongoing credit crisis because they are fairly straightforward and the crisis will have a dominating impact on the recruiting environment they would face for summer internships and post-MBA positions, regardless of whether they were interested in financial services.  At the time, it seemed to be a bit over the top but it turns out that I was on target.

Participants had done pre-work covering basic time value of money, annuities, and balance sheet basics.  In the workshop we put the time value of money and annuity material together to examine bonds and used bonds and balance sheets to examine leverage.  To make sense of leverage, we started with an individual purchasing a home with varying levels of down payment and selling it a year later with varying changes in home prices.  The effect on returns of increasing leverage is steadily attractive in a rising market but stomach-churningly brutal in a down market.  We extended that personal investment situation to consider investment funds using leverage to purchase mortgage-backed securities.

The overall conference was extremely well organized.  The participating women were very attentive and engaged in the quant skills workshop.  I hope that the workshop provided a foundation that has helped the participants in their first-year classes and also as they follow the incredible events of recent months.

I'll likely lead a similar workshop as part of next June's Forté conference in New York.

I'm in a breather period between second year elective teaching at Dartmouth's Tuck School and Duke's Fuqua School.  Professional Decision Modeling is a demanding decision consulting practice course.  Enrollments are down 30 percent from past years.  Students tell me this is due to time-sensitive course selection in a tough recruiting environment.

Over the past 50,000 quizzes submitted at mbamath.com in lessons covering the quantitative foundations of finance, accounting, economics, statistics, and spreadsheets, average quiz scores rise from 58% to 90%.  Below is the breakdown by topic:

The pace of incoming MBA student quantitative skills preparation at mbamath.com is picking up with MBA first-year starting in four to eight weeks for various programs:

Iowa's Tippie School of Management purchased MBA Math subscriptions for all incoming full-time students and recommends MBA Math for all incoming part-time students.

The Flores MBA at Louisiana State's Ourso College of Business purchased MBA Math subscriptions for all incoming students and recommends MBA Math for all incoming part-time students.

Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business purchased MBA Math subscriptions for all incoming students for the fourth year.