Operations Management Review, Ending and Grade

I took this course in the Spring of 2011:

This was an MBA level Operations Management Course. I will say that Ravi Subramanian was a great professor, educated, and general was excited to be teaching this class to Evening MBA’s, who are professionals and were eager to share their knowledge. There was a class project where we had to find an operation based problem, reporting on the project, analyzing the procedures and offering improvement insights and successes. My group had a few students who worked in operations and they gave me unbelievable supplemental knowledge to the teachings of the class.

Topics covered included flow charts, the basic of operations, Gantt charts (which have since come up at my work), bottle necking, and the like. Let me say that someone in operations for a living may believe the information in the class was way too rudimentary. It is possible that my operations based colleagues felt about this class the way I felt about the Marketing Management course I reviewed earlier. But for someone with no existing knowledge of the details of Operations Management, I found the course interesting.

The class had the project and a couple exams for the grade. Let me say the exams weren’t easy, in fact I found them to be difficult even open note exams. And the only problem I have with the super difficult exams is that we get the questions wrong but don’t ever learn the correct answer. If the goal of the program is to learn the material, and we get answers wrong on tests but never get to discuss the right answers then we have a batch of information we never really learned. I know that is a different diatribe, but I think it is important. I don’t care if I get a 50% or a 97%, in both circumstances there is some information I don’t know very well. Ravi specifically went over each exam questions for the class so we all knew where our thought process should have been… so refreshing that he went over answers to questions so we could learn. If the students didn’t think the same way he gave us a chance to write a request to regrade that question. If the argument made sense and could be justified he would give the points back; even if it was semantics based arguments – which resulted in my getting an answer correct.

This class was a great learning experience and honestly made me consider taking more operations based classes in the program. I think that is a very high praise from me as it takes a solid educator to sway me from the goals I have set for myself in the program. I give Ravi a solid “A” and the class a solid “A”, even though I received a solid “B”.