Edinburgh
Business School
Distance Learning MBA
A Personal
History
By Mark Akrigg, MBA
A caveat: different people have different needs
Are EBS exams unreasonably hard?
How I studied for the exams: the stages
Repeated iterations of quizzes and case studies
Practice Exams from the textbook
Resulting danger of overconfidence
The last 24 hours before the exam
Some remarks on the compulsory courses
Some remarks on the elective courses
International Trade and Finance
If you are thinking of doing an MBA, the program offered by Edinburgh Business School at Heriot-Watt University is well worth considering. Some advantages:
However, there are other factors which may appear to you as disadvantages. For example:
People have different needs, and different ways of learning. This document is a purely personal account of EBS, how it responded to my needs, and how I responded to EBS. It is not intended to be a universally applicable guide to how to succeed in the program.
As of summer 1997, I was working at a software company as a team leader, i.e. a senior programmer with a few supervisory responsibilities. I was getting somewhat bored. (My promotion to management, which cured this boredom, came halfway through the MBA.) I had been in the software industry for 14 years, and wanted to do something new. But I needed to do something to make my life more interesting.
I had thought of doing an MBA. But all the programs I had read about seemed rather expensive, some seemed a tad pretentious, and what they virtually all featured was a significant classroom component.
This posed a problem, for two reasons. The first factor was simple: I did not and do not own a car. If you live in downtown Toronto (or New York, or London, or San Francisco), you’ll understand why. Public transit is very good, and maintaining a car is very expensive. Although I commute to work in a high-tech suburb north of Toronto, even there public transit is not half bad during rush hour. But I would only be able to get from work to a local university in decent time if I bought a car.
The second factor was simple: I work in the software industry, and my work hours are not predictable. If a customer reports a major production issue at 4:55 in the afternoon, you and your team stay until you have fixed the problem. Similarly, if you’re in danger of missing a deadline, you stay late and do whatever it takes to make the deadline. If there were a conflict between staying to fix a problem/meet a deadline and going to a lecture or tutorial, the lecture/tutorial would lose. In other words, I was not in a position to enter a program with a rigidly scheduled mandatory classroom component.
It was at this point (17 August 1996: I still have the clipping) that I happened to see an article in the Globe and Mail, a leading Canadian newspaper, on alternative MBAs. The programs were listed in order of increasing flexibility: the last one described was described as “the ultimate in flexibility: this program offered by the Edinburgh Business School at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, is open to anyone regardless of educational background and comes with no classes, no discussions and no assignments. You just send away for learning materials and write a three-hour exam for each of the nine courses in the program.”
All this turned out to be perfectly true.
Equally true was a warning the Heriot-Watt Canadian agent gave later in the article: “The exams are brutal.”
It sounded perfect: I would learn a great deal, but would be free of unnecessary encumbrances. I sent off for the EBS pamphlet, and a friend who taught university in the UK did some further investigation on my behalf. EBS looked like a go. I phoned in my order, and a week later my first black binders of course material arrived. My life would never be the same again.
I won’t keep you in suspense. Here are the courses I took, the dates, my marks as percentages, and their letter-grade equivalents:
|
Accounting |
Dec 97 |
73 |
A |
|
Organizational Behaviour |
Dec 97 |
64 |
B |
|
Economics |
Jun 98 |
74 |
A |
|
Marketing |
Dec 98 |
65 |
A |
|
Finance |
Jun 99 |
62 |
B |
|
Quantitative Methods |
Jun 99 |
82 |
A+ |
|
International Trade and Finance |
Dec 99 |
80 |
A+ |
|
Strategic Planning |
Jun 00 |
75 |
A |
|
Financial Risk Management I |
Dec 00 |
71 |
A |
Taken together, these marks were enough for an MBA With Distinction.
At this point you may be asking one or both of the following questions:
(1) Since when is 65% an A?
(2) Why does an average in the low 70s rate an MBA With Distinction?
If you are asking these questions, you have not yet had the unique experience of writing an EBS examination.
EBS exams have two striking qualities:
(1) You are expected to know everything in the textbook. Mere general understanding is not good enough. You must know the material cold.
(2) The exams are very full considering you only have three hours. You need to work fast: you do not have the time to gradually recall material. Again, you must know the material cold.
I had early warning of this. A few weeks before the Accounting exam, I did the first practice Accounting exam from the textbook, mimicking real exam conditions: no breaks, and a three-hour limit. Going in, I thought I had the material well under control. Three hours of battle ensued. I then marked my paper using the sample answers in the book, taking care not to give myself the benefit of the doubt. The resulting mark was 55%. A few more slips on my part, and I would have been below 50%! Clearly action was needed. The remaining weeks were filled with extremely intense review.
Not really. As the university points out, these are graduate courses. Academic standards in graduate studies, whether for professional or research degrees, are much more stringent than for undergraduate courses. In an earlier life, I took an MA and a PhD in classical languages, i.e. Latin and Greek. My marks for the course portion were around 80-85%, seemingly higher than my EBS results. But the pass mark in these programs was 65%, i.e. 64% was a fail. So in fact my marks were at much the same level at EBS as in the other graduate programs I had taken.
I would conclude that the EBS courses were neither more nor less demanding than those in other rigorous graduate programs.
There are major differences between the courses, and of course my studying technique evolved as the program continued. However, there was a general pattern which I followed from course to course. The pattern, or set of stages, was as follows:
To start with, I would read straight through the course textbook, not taking any notes. However, I would do all of the multiple choice exercises at the end of each chapter: my score would indicate the degree of comprehension I had achieved. I would attempt the case studies as well, except where the case studies were either too difficult for me to attempt at that point, or too time consuming. I wanted to avoid getting bogged down at this point. The objective was simply to obtain an overview of the subject.
During the second reading, I would take full notes on the material. I used a notebook computer to create the notes. The notes were intended to be a complete representation of the information in the textbook, but in point form, and as concise as I could make them without losing any essential information. This would take a fair number of weeks to do, and was the longest stage of the preparation cycle. I created the notes with two objectives in mind:
As before, I did all of the multiple-choice quizzes. In addition, I did all of the case studies, except where
At this point I would start review iterations. First I would read my notes for an individual chapter, then I would do the multiple-choice quiz and case studies. I would do this a number of times. If a particular chapter consistently yielded unusually poor results on the multiple choice quiz, or if the case studies caused me problems, I would devote extra time to that chapter to bring my level of knowledge up.
A good rule of thumb was that if I scored 80% or more on a multiple choice quiz, I had a reasonable grasp of the chapter. If I scored 90%, I had an excellent knowledge.
Not more than four weeks before the exam, I would write the practice exams from the textbook. As I related above, for Accounting, which I took at the start of the program, I replicated the actual conditions of the exam: 3 hours, no breaks, the stereo silent.
This had the advantage of reproducing the conditions of the actual exam. It had the disadvantage that it left me rather stressed out, just like a real exam. So during subsequent courses when attempting the practice exams, I would break the exam into its constituent parts: multiple choice questions, case studies, and so on. I would do one part at a time, take a break (either a total break, or some review), then return to the exam to do the next part. I would make very certain that an overall time limit of 3 hours applied to the time I was actually writing the exam.
The practice exam results turned out to be an excellent predictor of my performance on the actual exam.
The University publishes a Student Handbook, which includes practice exams. (The edition that I had was from 1995, and may have been superseded.) Some of the sample exams are the same as in the textbooks, but others are found only in the handbook. However, the handbook offers examples of actual student answers as well. These student answers have two notable features:
· They are good quality answers. In fact, sometimes you read them and think that really nothing more can possibly be said on the topic in question.
· Examiners’ comments are included! These comments are the best opportunity you will have to get an impression of exactly how the EBS examiners will go about marking your paper. Read them carefully.
The university posts past exams on the EBS website: you will find them at www.ebs.hw.ac.uk/MBA/studentservice/EX/index.html .
There is a danger of overload here. If there are six past examinations posted for your subject, it is not worth your while to spend the time writing and rewriting every part of all six exams. What you can do is ensure that you are in a position to answer all of the questions in a reasonable way. If several questions bear a close resemblance, do one of the instances in detail. If any question causes you particular difficulty, place particular importance on repeating it, until you are sure that you can handle an equivalent question when you are writing your exam.
There is a danger of overconfidence. Suppose you are at home, well rested, have recently reviewed the appropriate part of the textbook, and have some trouble doing a question correctly, but nonetheless get it basically right.
Consider how you might react to the same question under exam conditions. You didn’t sleep extremely well, you arrived early, the other students gathering for the exam were nervous, and your mood was affected. You have just realized that you bombed out on the previous question, but you have no time to go back and try to improve your answer. How well do you think you will do?
In other words, prepare for the worst.
You can’t review everything. Focus on two classes of items
· Things that are certain to be on the exam
· Areas which you found particularly difficult
In particular, focus on brute memorization of lists where this will be useful. For example, in Accounting, you will need to memorize the standard accounting ratios perfectly. Similarly, in Strategic Planning, you will need to know all of the stages of the strategic planning process in the planning model favoured by the textbook.
It’s exam time now. There you are, surrounded by other EBS students, none of whom you have seen before. Or perhaps you’re in a smaller location, and you’re writing the paper alone.
But of course, whatever the physical circumstances, the fact is that you’re entirely alone. You have handed in no assignments, done no group projects, and written no midterms. You don’t know the faculty, and you don’t know the markers. It’s just you and the exam. Three hours stand between you and the end of the course.
The examination is too long for the 3 hours allotted. If you do full justice to one question, you’ll make the situation even worse for the next. Minor variations in time allocation between questions of equal value are fine, as long as (1) the variations are in fact minor, and (2) you truly believe that the question you are giving less time to will take less time to answer. But make sure that you leave enough time to make a reasonable attempt to answer each question. Don’t even think of leaving a question unanswered. Even a poor answer will be better than none.
The Edinburgh Business School has an unrivalled talent for creating fiendishly difficult multiple choice questions.
Not every exam will have them, but most will. In spite of their difficulty, I prize these questions highly, because if you do a very good job on them, you will get a mark very close to 100% in this section, because the scores are all or nothing. In contrast, the essay questions/case studies are inevitably quite subjective, with the result that in practice you will never get an essay mark higher than 80%, and probably much less.
The result is that I was willing to give the multiple-choice questions more than their fair share of time, when this was required. A case in point was Financial Risk Management 1, where the questions involved a good deal of mathematics, and took me more than an hour, even though they were only worth one third of the final mark. In other exams, the multiple choice questions took a good deal less than one hour.
If you do a good job of the multiple choice questions, you are in a strong position. Heading into the case studies and essay questions, you know that you already have a mark of (say) 27%. You only need to get 23% more to get an unconditional pass. This 23% is from the 66.6% of the exam which remains. In other words, you only need to get 35% on the remaining parts of the exam to get a pass.
Careful repetition of the multiple choice questions from the textbook and from the practice exams will be invaluable in preparing for the exam.
These remarks are not meant to summarize the courses. Instead, they are comments and suggestions that I haven’t seen elsewhere, which you might find useful.
The textbook is very, very well written. It assumes no prior knowledge, but moves extremely fast. At the same time, it takes no short cuts. In other words, if the author says that they will briefly touch on something, don’t believe them! They will provide a full discussion.
The examination was a stomach-churning experience, and I was somewhat concerned about the outcome. But in fact my result of 73% was fine, so clearly I had over-reacted. The moral is not to place too much credence in your personal feelings when writing an EBS exam. If you have prepared carefully, you will come through. And do not let your emotions during the exam slow you down in completing it!
Be sure when going into the exam that you have completely memorized the accounting ratios: current ratio and so on.
The textbook is by Professor Lumsden himself, founder of the Distance Learning program, and is written to a very high standard.
I found the Macroeconomics section of the textbook considerably more mysterious than the Microeconomics section. The most enigmatic chapter of all was Module 19 “Integration of the Real and Monetary Sectors of the Economy”. For me the solution was simply reading the chapter again and again, until finally it made sense. Here I can offer a piece of advice. Have a look at Figure 19.3 “The liquidity and money (LM) schedule” and Figure 19.4 “Increase in the money supply - shift in the LM schedule”. Look at the diagrams very, very carefully. Do you see some extremely faint horizontal and vertical lines in the four quadrants of each of the two figures? Do not be deceived by the faintness of these lines. If you understand them, you understand the chapter.
Professor Boudreaux’s exposition of finance is a model of lucid and elegant technical writing. Once you have read this book, you will never read the financial press the same way again.
The course is difficult, particularly Module 12 “Advanced Topics: Options, Agency, Derivatives and Financial Engineering”. The examinations are difficult as well. In my case, the first case study on the exam was simply too complex for the time allotted, and I did a poor job of it. However, I ended up with an overall mark of 62% in spite of this unfortunate event. I believe that my salvation was a well-done set of multiple choice questions, which raised the overall average.
A word of advice: make sure that you become extremely proficient in bond arithmetic: calculating implied future interest rates and so on, before writing the exam
The textbook is gigantic, consisting of 20 chapters, each of which is 30 pages or so in length.
I made the mistake of attempting to do Marketing at the same time as the Quantitative Methods course, but quickly realized my error, and faxed in a request to defer the Quantitative Methods exam to June of the following year.
The virtue of the Marketing course is that it is comprehensive. After you’ve finished it, you certainly will know a lot about how to do market research, how to design a product, and how to market the product, and through which channels.
On the other hand, its very length makes it difficult to master. In this connection, I found it very helpful to read The Portable MBA in Marketing, second edition (Wiley, 1998), by Charles Schewe & Alexander Hiam, ISBN 0-471-19367-4, which covers much the same material in an agreeably snappy fashion, and was excellent secondary study material.
A second challenge I faced was a type of culture shock. The world of marketing was completely foreign to me, and I found it difficult to adjust. It became clear to me that I could use some help beyond what the textbook provided.
So I made a point of buying Advertising Age magazine on a regular basis, and of buying some books on marketing. The quality of these books was variable, but by reading them I became familiar with the mental landscape of marketing.
However, the Portable MBA book already mentioned is rather well written. Another book I found which was conspicuously well written was Ogilvy on Advertising, by David Ogilvy, the famous copywriter and advertising executive. I found it in a handy paperback format, published by Vintage Books, ISBN 039472903X. The book did not relate directly to the course, but gave a fuller view of the world of advertising, and provided a welcome break from studying the textbook.
The examination consisted entirely of case studies, unlike the textbook, which had many multiple choice questions at the end of each chapter. As a result, the exam was a little unnerving. However, I simply tried to apply the concepts from the textbook in a reasonably methodical way, and things worked out fairly well.
The EBS Student Handbook (1995 edition, ISBN 027361234 4) more than paid for itself with its warning in the Marketing section that many students misread exam questions “and provide the outline of a marketing plan instead of the marketing research plan specified in the question”. Had I not seen this warning, I might easily have misread one of the exam questions and made exactly this error.
Textbook: Release 1.2, 1995
In writing the essay questions of the exam, there was a danger of lapsing into personal reminiscence (“war stories”) instead of sticking to academic analysis. There is no question in my mind that I was guilty of this to some degree.
It is also the only course in the entire program in which I felt truly self-confident when answering the essay questions. But the mark I received in the course was lower than in any course but Finance. Be warned by my example!
The textbook starts off gently, and is reasonably straightforward up through Module 7 “Distributions”. Module 8 “Statistical Inference” is much, much more difficult than what precedes, and the textbook continues at this new, higher level of difficulty right through to the 15th and final module, “Managing Forecasts”.
For the second, more mathematical part of the textbook, all that I can recommend is constant repetition. This worked for me: unexpectedly, it was in this course that I ended up getting my highest mark of the program.
The first few modules, although less difficult, turned out to be immediately useful. At work, I create many documents each year which simply present data to client companies or my own company’s senior management. There was an immediate, noticeable, and permanent improvement in the quality of these documents as soon as I had read Module 3 “Data Communication” for the first time.
Like Marketing, this is a somewhat subjective area, so the quantitative portion of the textbook is relatively slender. There are no multiple choice questions in the textbook or on the exam.
However, the textbook is tightly written, and I found it more agreeable to contend with than Marketing. Its section on reasons for (and against) acquisitions was unforgettable, and made immediate sense of some of the current takeover battles (and aftermaths) that I was reading about in the business press. I found Appendix 1 “Strategy Report” immediately helpful in presenting some analysis that I had been doing at work.
This was one course where outside reading was helpful. The books I found most immediately useful were:
· Competitive Strategy, by Michael Porter (New York: Free Press; ISBN 0684841487)
· Competitive Advantage, also by Michael Porter (New York: Free Press; ISBN 0684841487)
· The Portable MBA in Strategy, by Liam Fahey and Robert M Randall (New York: Wiley; ISBN 0471197084)
To get more background in specific company histories, I read the business stories in the Economist each week, and also read
I also read the first third of My Years at General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan (New York: Doubleday; ISBN 0385042353). I did not finish the book because I ran out of time for extra reading as the exam approached. The book itself is excellent.
I don’t think there’s any strong need to read the specific company histories that I chose, but I do think it’s helpful to choose one or two company histories to give some reality to the theory provided by the textbook. Take a second look before purchasing the business history titles your bookstore is promoting most heavily: they tend to be aimed at a general audience, and can be insubstantial and (in the case of company founders) somewhat self-centred.
Both of the electives I took were in the area of Finance. I took International Trade and Finance because my own area of software has a global market, and the course seemed relevant. I took Financial Risk Management 1 because it looked challenging and interesting. It turned out to be both, but perhaps went a bit overboard on the challenging side.
Textbook: Release 1.2, 1995
The textbook was very well written, and dealt in an informative way with such topics as trade policy, economic integration, exchange rates, and the International Monetary Fund. It was not as difficult as the compulsory courses, so simply in order to expand my knowledge I did substantial outside reading.
Because of the date of its last revision, the text did not deal with such subjects as
· The WTO (World Trade Organization), which had not yet come into existence and superseded the GATT organization
· The creation of the Euro
· The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
· The Asian monetary crisis of the late 90s
It proved to be simple enough to find outside books that dealt with these subjects. In addition, I found that the websites of the World Trade Organization (www.wto.org) and the International Monetary Fund (www.imf.org) offered excellent supplementary material which was, of course, free of charge.
The course deals with such areas as market mechanisms, interest rate risk, financial risk quantification, and credit risk. It has a heavy mathematical component, and in my opinion is more difficult than most of the compulsory courses. It is what you would expect a graduate course in Finance to be like.
That said, the quality of the textbook is at the program’s usual high level, and the exercises and case studies provide a full review of the material in each chapter.
The textbook contained a number of typos, which at times slowed me down. However, you can find a list of corrections at watercooler.domainvalet.com/files/frm1err.doc . Keep your life simple: enter the full set of corrections in your copy of the textbook.
For (relatively) light reading that offered something of a break from the course, I used
· Risk: the new management imperative in finance, by James T Gleason (Princeton: Bloomberg Press, 2000; ISBN 1576600742)
· The Collapse of Barings, by Stephen Fay (London: Richard Cohen, 1996: ISBN 0393040550)
I also read two books on the Long-Term Capital Management crisis of 1998:
· When Genius Failed, by Roger Lowenstein (New York: Random House, 2000; ISBN 1841155039)
· Inventing Money, by Nicholas Dunbar (Chichester: Wiley, 2000; ISBN 0471498114)
The Financial Risk Management 1 exam did not go extremely well. The multiple choice exams were difficult. I took the time necessary to answer them (as I mentioned, I place a high value on the multiple choice questions), but this left me short of time at the end of the exam, so for the final case study in the exam, I had to give a relatively skimpy set of answers.
However, two months later, my marks came in, and they were fine. I had completed all 9 courses, and would be graduating in July!