Fall and Spring Business School Courses To Switch

In an important move to make the Business School's first-year curriculum more cohesive, the school will switch the sequence of two required courses next fall.

"Production Operations Management," a production and marketing offering, will be taught next fall, switching semesters with "Control," another first-year requirement that covers areas of finance primarily concerned with accounting.

The move, already approved by the MBA faculty policy committee, awaits passage next month by a vote of the entire Business School faculty, said Thomas R. Piper, chairman of the MBA Policy Committee.

All Business School students follow a predetermined course of study in their first year. The policy committee approved the change on recommendation from the 10 faculty members of the B-School's Required Courses Subcommittee who had voted unanimously to reverse the order of two of these courses.

F. Warren MacFarlan, chairman of the subcommittee, said the move will be made in order to restore a "linkage" between certain areas of business that have been missing in the curriculum in the last few years.

"Production Operations Management" will now be taught with "Marketing," while "Control" moves to the second semester to be offered alongside "Finance."

"Some things were being missed," MacFarlan said about not teaching the production course simultaneously with a marketing course.

"There are tremendous synergies between [the production course] and the other courses taught in the fall," said Roy D. Shapiro, head of the production course. "I think it's a great idea."

Opposition to the recommendation has come from those concerned that students will not have a strong enough command of accounting to survive the production course in their first term at the Business School.

"They're moving more and more to having a stronger base of knowledge in accounting," said Skip E. Wagner, a second-year student who is a member of the Required Courses Subcommittee.

To help the students feel more comfortable with the financial material, the Business School may offer a series of ungraded accounting classes in the early fall, MacFarlan said.

Wagner and second-year student Pat S. Schuch, the other student representative on the subcommittee, were not present at the decision-making meeting, which was held during the winter break.

"[MacFarlan] said it was totally an administrative oversight," Wagner said of the choice to hold the meeting during vacation.

"My first reaction was kind of hurt and anger," Schuch said.

Piper said the students will play an active role this spring in drafting the details of the plan.

Said Schuch: "You have to try new things. They should go ahead and try it for a year."