The second course I took during my first semester was Data Analysis (an Excel based Analysis and Basic Statistic course). This course was fundamentally awesome. I have no background using Excel as a tool, so every bit of material was really quite useful.
I would say the book for the course “Data Analysis & Decision Making 3e” was definitely worth purchasing, all of the material covered in the course is covered in depth in the book. The book also came with a disc with additional free add-in material that helps with real world application and shows the reader the usefulness of Excel as a business tool.
With all of that said… The book was a better resource than the lecture. The professor, Robert Burgess, is articulate and detail oriented. Unfortunately, this type of material can only be covered in a certain way. So, at times the lectures, dragged a bit, although they were easy to follow. The professor did a great job of using off topic material to keep the class fun, which is very much appreciated from the student’s point of view.
There were three tests in the class, all of which gave a really good overview of the application of the material. This is a technical university, and because of that, I am happy this course was added to the core requirements.
The largest percentage grade in the class came from a group presentation using all of the material learned in the course. The interesting thing about the organization of the groups, is that the professor had us each take an online survey to find information on our personal backgrounds. He then put our groups together in a way that created the most “chaos”. My background was in Hotel Sales, my group mates ranged from Marine Biology to Engineering to Finance. The group worked very well together, as unlike undergraduate studies, everyone was enrolled in the MBA program for the same reasons: to learn.
I will add one more item to commend the professor, he gave a group project that was extremely open ended, which kept the class interested and was a great end of course presentation / case study on how randomly thrown together groups could interpret the exact same set of directions differently. The presentations and group project was really a lot of fun. Doing the group project was at times frustrating and difficult to see past the insanity of the open ended project. Once you could catch a glimps to the professors end game everything became much more clear. On the final day of class when all the groups presented, everything that wasn't cleared up prior to that point, instantly clicked.
Ultimately, I walked out of the class with an “A”. I feel that is the perfect representation of my knowledge on Excel after completing the class. I would also give the overall class a “B+”. The professor did a great job of making the material interesting to the students, but as the class applied to lecture, it was hard to handle at times. I have a hard time believing that any of the other core courses will be able to take such drab material and apply them in such creative ways; thank you to Professor Burgess for a well thought out and interesting class.
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