Excelsior Business Strategy 495

[MISin08]

I had Dr Harter who was not at all like the accounts I read above of Dr. Sherman.

The discussion forum is a big part of the class, but in my opinion, not a very good part of the class. Harter is pretty conservative and this sort of set the tone. He's a little too willing to let people make unsourced statements; I found myself unable even to reply to the "________ is socialist" chatter and other indications that students get their ideas from talk radio. There were a few students with real-world experience in addition to book learning, and I did learn from them.

Dr. Harter was slow to grade discussion postings and this made it hard to know if I was on track. In the end, comments above about easy grading of discussion postings seemed to hold. Most students wrote brief responses to all 4-5 questions in both the case and chapter forum topics each week; the sort of thing where they re-state the book "in your own words" but don't add much. People kept doing this even after he posted grades, so it must enough to get by. I tended to write a substantive response to one or two questions, bringing in outside sources, or applying analysis from the other business courses. [This is not hard to do if you can use Google Books and the library. I would usually focus on what I call the "minority topic" or expanding the topic -- for example, in the first chapter we talk about "what is strategic management?", so I used some stuff from Mintzberg, who is critical of strategic management. Or I would go to the original sources and find relevant topics not in the text.] He didn't give a lot of feedback on individual posts but he seems fair-minded and if your argument is sound and sticks to the business curriculum, that will reflect well in your grade, you just have to wait to find that out! The syllabus says to post by Thursday each week and respond to at least one other post by Sunday. Prof allowed people to catch up on discussions that were weeks old, and was quite open about it. We got to week 10 before he told the group to post more substantive responses than "I agree.."

Dates for some chapter quizzes didn’t line up with the course schedule, This was explained as a problem with Blackboard, the course software. This was a minor annoyance. It is, of course, easy to get all 100s, as discussed here.

Watch to make sure you stay on top of the reading, because IMHO you need better grasp of the chapters for the case analysis than you do for the weekly discussions, so it would be easy to get sloppy then find yourself having to re-read a lot to do your case.

The case analysis really is a pretty valuable exercise and I got a lot from it. Pro: he doesn't dictate how you should do it. Con: this means you have to figure it out on your own. On one level, "welcome to senior year", but on another, it would have been great to review some case analyses in class and go over their strong and weak points. It may be the discussions are intended to serve this purpose, but it's not run tightly enough to be effective. I found some guidance on other professors' websites and a fellow student shared some vital info with me as well. I worked quite hard on my case and got 30 of 30.

The capstone is required now. Several students in my section didn't realize it tested previously studied Business Core material, not the Business Strategy material. I scored 83, mostly because my other class was pretty challenging and I couldn't make time to prepare fully for the capstone. It covers accounting, finance, economics, management, marketing, quantitative methods/operations, legal environment. The level corresponds to CLEP. I could have pulled a 95 or better with study. I think we got points for it but the potential points were not counted, in other words, the capstone would only improve your grade.

Phillip