Thought Overflow

I’m going to have to keep this one really short because I have no time to write a proper post.

Too many B-schools advocate “academic rigour”. A 30-hour contact course in XLRI supposedly requires 70 hours of work outside the classroom. We have 7.5 courses this term (one of them is a 4.5-credit course as opposed to an ordinary 3-credit course).

Contact hours = 225 (7.5 x 30)
Outside classroom work expected = 525 (7.5 x 70)

Total hours to be dedicated to coursework = 750 hours

750 hours = 31.25 days, if we work continuously without taking breaks for food, water or anything else.

The fourth term here is approximately 70 days in duration. Also, don’t forget all the extra-curricular work that is expected of us.

Thanks to your rigour, what suffers is quality. If we have to do a project that I would ideally have liked to dedicate a week to, but have to finish in one night, you know that there’s not going to be enough research, and it’s all just going to be information that’s available on the surface. Is this what we’re supposed to learn in MBA? The art of fluffing, of using jargon and stellar presentations to impress your audience and hope that no probing questions are asked?