President's Desk
Revised MBA Guidelines
By Thomas Cook
INFORMS President
tom.cook@calebtech.com
I want to discuss a very important issue that has critical relevance to both our academia members and to those who practice OR. Many of you know that prior to 1991, OR/MS was a required course for all AACSB-accredited MBA programs. In 1991, that requirement was dropped by the AACSB, and most business schools took OR/MS out of their core MBA curricula. Consequently, fewer MBA students are exposed to OR/MS and OR/MS faculties in business schools have shrunk for lack of demand.What has happened since 1991 has exacerbated our profession's most serious problem. Today, most managers and executives who are faced with important, complex decisions do not turn to our profession for help. Most don't even consider OR/MS because they don't have a clue about what we do or what our value proposition is.
In short, we blew it when we had the luxury of AACSB MBA guidelines that required OR/MS. I believe that most of us (and I am as guilty as anyone) had never done a good job of understanding what our students needed from an MBA course in OR/MS, and what they would perceive as value. Consequently, too many of us taught the course like the first course we had taken, which in retrospect was really dumb. What many of us were teaching might have been good for a first course in an OR curriculum but definitely wasn't the right course for the vast majority of MBA students who were taking only one course.
The good news is that thanks to the efforts of Kal Singhal and many others in INFORMS, the AACSB revised their MBA guidelines in April of this year [see "The Last Word," page 72]. Unfortunately, OR/MS was not reinstated as a required course because there are no required courses in the AACSB MBA guidelines. What Kal and others were able to do is put language in the new standards that requires the coverage of "statistical data analysis and management science."
Now that we have won the battle and gotten the AACSB to recognize the value of OR/MS and make management science a key ingredient to an accredited MBA program, we must do everything we can to avoid making the same mistakes we have made in the past. We have to redesign our introductory courses and create better and more relevant teaching materials that support the objectives of the revamped courses. In addition, we must learn how to teach these revised courses using best practices of those that have been successful. In my opinion, our goal should be to have the most relevant, exciting and most popular course in the MBA curriculum. We can do it!
At the spring Practice Conference, the INFORMS Education Committee led by Andres Weintraub offered a proposal that could have a significant impact on the quality of OR/MS education in business schools. The proposal was prepared by Andres Weintraub, Steve Powell, Tom Grossman, Peter Bell and Jim Cochran. The proposal, presented by Tom Grossman, addressed two major needs or requirements to achieve the goal of improving the quality of business school education across the country by growing the importance of and quality of OR/MS in the curriculum. The first need addressed by the Committee's proposal is the critical shortage of relevant cases and teaching materials. The idea is for INFORMS to make a four-year commitment to establish and launch a collection of branded teaching materials that would leverage the Edelman competition, develop more than 40 experimental exercises, projects and cases, and distribute them through an established case house. An editorial board and a small group of associate editors are being recruited to take the lead with reviewing submissions and working with authors as warranted.
The second initiative is aimed at improving the quality of teaching by conducting a series of three-day summer workshops where the goal is to share best practices and disseminate effective teaching methods using the cases and materials created by the collection of branded teaching materials. Workshops like these have been run by Steve Powell, Peter Bell and Wayne Winston over the past several years. We plan to leverage the experience of these highly successful workshops to provide a very valuable experience for those who want to improve the educational experience of their business students, and have a significant impact on our field.
So, if you teach OR/MS to business students (undergraduate or graduate), I'm asking you to make a commitment to take a critical look at what you teach and how you teach OR/MS and ask yourself the following question: Is this course for future OR/MS practitioners or is it to educate future managers about the OR value proposition, and ensure that those future managers are intelligent consumers of OR/MS? In addition, do my students develop quantitative skills that will give them a competitive advantage in their entry level jobs?
If you are educating future consumers, I encourage you to get involved with one of these initiatives. If enough professors take this challenge seriously and are motivated to create and teach the most relevant and most popular course in their business schools, I am sure we can have a very positive impact on the demand for OR/MS in organizations, as well as improving our image and demand for our courses within academia.
In our initiative of marketing the profession, I can't think of many activities that would have a more positive impact than dramatically improving the relevance, quality and hence the popularity of the introductory OR/MS course in today's business schools.
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