In April 2024, our HBA Program was underwent a quality assurance process review. A review takes place every 7 years and has Internal and external reviewers examine how well our program met our institution’s degree outcomes.

To do so, they looked at reports that we developed that described our courses and the program’s objective, and studied how well those mapped onto the institutional degree outcomes. This was all supplemented with interviews with faculty members, program directors, and administrators, to better understand how the design of the program meets the outcomes we claim to offer.

The review requires a lot of preparation, but it did give us (the faculty) a chance to step back from the details of our own courses and instead see how our course fit within a bigger picture of learning. It also allowed us to more critically examine our course offerings and their timing.

The Ivey HBA program is special (yes, each and every one of our programs is special). It’s a 2+2 program, where students complete their first two years of university in a program of their choosing, whether it be engineering, music, history, economics, health sciences, or whatever. Before entering 3rd year, students bound for Ivey will complete 1 pre-requisite course, Accounting and Business Analysis.

When students officially enter the Ivey program in their 3rd year, they come with mixed foundational knowledge. The entire first year consists of core courses, and then in their 4th year they can explore electives that range from supply chain management to entrepreneurship to mergers and acquisition or to data science.

A conversation that emerged from the review process was that the Fall term of HBA1 is very focused on quantitative courses: Accounting and Financial Fundamentals, Decision Making with Analytics, and Finance. It’s a term that is heavy with numerical analysis and Excel, and that almost fades away by the time January rolls around.

Myself and Kyle, a co-author of this work, are course coordinators for DMA, and our Program Administrators asked: is there a reason why DMA couldn’t be offered in the winter term instead, or maybe even in HBA2 as a 4th year course?

Great question. Why is DMA offered in the fall term instead of the winter? Can we justify pedagogically why it was placed in that term?

We can certainly make some arguments for why it is a reasonable term to be offered (it scares the students into taking school seriously… it develops good model-thinking skills that help break complex ideas into smaller, organized “modules”… it develops data literacy and critical thinking, which is just plain important.)

But there might be benefits for offering the course later. Students would have more financial analysis skills, so course content could cover some more complicated portfolio optimization models…. With more knowledge of effective communication, student could be expected to do more presentations of their analyses…

There are certainly all things that we could expect of them now, but would require DMA faculty to either adjust their expectations of what students can reasonably achieve, OR, spend teaching time focused on topics/concepts that are somewhat adjacent and not the main focus of DMA.

What about for other courses? Why are they offered when they are offered?

I’m certain (or hopeful) that there were pedagogical reasons when the curriculum was originally conceived; that it was meant to resemble an MBA program, where courses happen almost in “sprints” with lots of coordination between courses and topics, sometimes spanning both the fall and winter terms.

As our program grew in size (to 10 sections of 78 students each), achieving this level of coordination became unruly, and so the courses were limited to single terms.

So…. for DMA, we’d consider moving it to the winter term. But we would want this to be for another (a better?) reason than “students find so many number-based courses difficult.”

Let’s ensure that what we are considering offering is sensible and follows an established best practice….. But is there a best practice?

If there is a “best sequence” or set of best sequences for business school curriculum, should those critical paths be the ones adopted by all business schools?

To investigate this, we gathered program information for 37 business schools in Canada and the US, focusing on those that were ranked on recognized lists, such as Macleans and US News, resulting in 764 courses in our database.

After filtering out schools that had too few courses, or more specifically too few MSOR courses, there were 21 schools remaining in our analysis.

LLM-assisted coding to group courses into “Subject Areas”

Accounting has the most courses offered, as a subject area, across the schools we examined. MSOR has the 3rd most courses. The Management subject area encompassed mostly introductory business courses that did not focus on any of the specific subject areas we identified but rather offered a broad overview of those subjects.

What do we mean when we say MSOR course? Well… it includes quite a few topics, usually and introductory course on business statistics, then moving into “analytics” and “decision-making” and “modelling” for managers.

Since we teach decision making with analytics, our focus was really drawn to where students are first introduced to MSOR as a subject area.

In this chart, we show how many MSOR courses are offered in each year of the school’s program. For most schools, MSOR is introduced in year 1, and it might even end there for some.

Others don’t see MSOR until year 2 of the program, some with full force (Telfer in Ottawa, for example). And just two wait until Year 3 to introduce MSOR.

But this analysis isn’t quite fair – not all programs are equal!

Some, like Ivey, have “general educational requirements” in the 1st year which might span into 2nd year, so exposure to specific subject areas is limited. Others dive right into these subjects from day 1, with general business courses showing up in later years.

Rather than compare the nominal year in which the subject area courses are offered, we instead want to compare the relative “position” in the program that the course is offered. To find this “position”, for each school we find the average year that Subject X is offered.

Etc.

At this moment, we’re not so concerned about the specific course that is being taught, but more about the order in which a subject area is introduced.

Let’s start with the earliest subjects. Based on our dataset, these four courses are offered as early as Year 1. [Comms, Acct, MGTM, MSOR]

Okay, what about the latest subject. Based on our dataset, with overwhelming agreement, Strategy is offered in Year 4.

Okay, what about the middle then…. Year 2 sees courses like IS, Marketing, and OB, and Year 3 would be Finance, Operations Management and Professional Development.

The timing of when MSOR is introduced is partly due to the structure of the program, obviously… let’s look at a school that introduces MSOR earlier, like Sauder School of Business.

Their first-year curriculum dives right into business courses. There’s room for 1 elective during this year.

https://mybcom.sauder.ubc.ca/courses-money-enrolment/program-requirements/bcom-requirements

Contrast that now with Wharton, where MSOR is introduced later. The first year does have some intro to economics and a pure math or stats course, but students take 3 to 5 “other courses” outside of the business program.

https://undergrad.wharton.upenn.edu/flexible-curriculum/

Or…. Posed differently… do some subjects “move” together or “opposite” one another? If we look at the percentile ranks of the subjects, will we see any patterns?

Let’s see if the correlation matrix offers any insight.

Squares that tend toward red are positively correlated. For example, MSOR and OPS are positively correlated – if MSOR is moved earlier, then OPS will also move earlier.

MSOR and ACCT are negatively correlated, implying that if MSOR is offered earlier then ACCT will be offered later.

We want to be clear that this is not a prescriptive model at all, rather, this is what we’re observing based on the 21 schools that we studied. We don’t know why the courses are sequenced the way that they are, it’s just the sequencing that we’ve uncovered.

We can only understand so much from scanning a website. Interviewing program directors, past and present, would provide richer insight regarding the curriculum design. (And it would make good on our title that this was a mixed-methods inquiry.)

We also want to know whether the sequencing is effective at achieving the business program’s desired learning outcomes. This might mean more data analysis. Looking just at graduation rates and grades is alright, but a better measure could be about lifelong learning and how our graduates fare several years beyond their undergraduate degree.

Critical Paths for Business Education (Ongoing)

Isaac Wang