Teachers' Forum: Teaching MBA Quantitative Business Analysis with Cases

Abstract

Interest is rising in how operations research/management science (OR/MS) fits into the Masters of Business Administration (MBA) curriculum and how we can make OR/MS courses more successful. Sessions on these topics proliferate at our professional meetings. At University of Virginia's Darden School, the quantitative analysis faculty has endeavored to move away from the traditional technique-driven, compartmentalized quantitative methods course to a first-year MBA course that is decision oriented, integrated within a business curriculum, managerially exciting, and dedicated to student-centered learning and cases. I want to describe our experience with this course, to indicate some of the critical success factors associated with it, and to provide ideas that may prove useful elsewhere.