Come tomorrow and I am one-eighth MBA. Our first of eight terms ends. My first two exams went well. Relatively, that is. Accounting was good. My corporate banking background which involved decent amount of dealing with financial statements did help. Economics was maddening. I think the Prof has a unusual way of looking at things. But, understand he is liberal when giving marks. There is partial grading, meaning that even if the answers to the problems are wrong, if one has worked with equations properly, one get some marks. What do equations and problems have to do with Economics? We were covering Microeconomics and globally, many good schools try to teach microeconomics through problem solving. Don’t know if this is the best way. Out Stats Profs have a better way of testing students. They give minimal number of questions and all are multiple choice. All that they test are conceptual understanding and clarity. One sure response I have been getting from all when I ask how is the prep for marketing exam, “what do you study/what to study for marketing”. No one seems to have clue on what is going to be asked in marketing exam. It was vaguely mentioned by Marketing Prof that he would give quant oriented questions.

As one can see, the entire first term was heavily quant oriented. I presume the remaining of the terms, at least core courses, will be so. Thought initially I felt quite repulsive to the idea of trying to measure everything, I think the only way to go about making sense when dealing with complexity, huge amount of information, divergent opinions, etc, is to have some common metric – numbers, which is best possible way of holding sway many complex variables. I hope by the time the course ends, I improve my quant abilities, not just a liking towards numbers.

PS: The common opinion is that many of the IITians are going to be amongst the toppers. These guys would really have been so much with equations and numbers that what we think through some language, they think through equations.