Excelsior Business Strategy 495

[jackbanta]

I'd just like to add a few things about this class.

To begin with, the discussion posts were a joke. I mean, they wouldn't have been bad as a homework assignment, but they didn't really seem to spur any discussion. The questions were designed to pretty much regurgitate what you read in the book. A lot of "what's the definition of this?". At first, I put a lot of time into them, trying to come up with a creative angle, but in my section the instructor was pretty much MIA the whole class, so about halfway through I stopped putting in the same amount of effort. Didn't hurt my grade any, I only missed 1 point on the discussions the whole time and that was because I only replied to one person one week instead of two. It was really hard for me to force myself to reply to people sometimes because what they were saying was basically just out of the book. Basically, I don't think the format made any sense. Even the "case study" topic questions were written just to see if you had read the "case study" in the book. I was hoping for an upper level business strategy class that it would involve some more free thinking, but that was beyond the scope of the class, apparently.

The weekly quizzes were easy, if poorly written on occasion. 20 questions (except one week when it was only 10... weird), unlimited time. If you had the chapter notes pdf pulled up while doing them, you could quickly reference most of the answers.

The capstone test was really hard, I thought. It wasn't based on the course AT ALL. It really was a combination of all the business courses and pretty obscure at times too. If I had my accounting book out when I was taking it, I probably would have done better, as the depth of those questions threw me (and that was the first section too). I only ended up getting an 85 on it and taking up almost the full two hours. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't decided to take it when I did. I took it a week before the last week on more or less a whim... if I had spent a little bit of time preparing, I probably could have broken 90 and gotten all 5 points for the test, but oh well. I still got an A in the course.

The only part of the course that I really felt was worthwhile was the case analysis. It was actually pretty fun researching a company and writing up an analysis for it. The rest of the class seemed like a poorly designed review of other business courses and the text was pretty awfully written as well. For the only class I ever took at Excelsior, it didn't exactly leaving me wanting to take more classes with them. Some of my classmates seemed to feel the same way as well, with one women who had taken more courses at Excelsior and other classes elsewhere saying it was the worst class she'd ever taken.

Rumor is that they're changing the format soon, which is good.