BA 6520 Global Marketing Strategy

BA 6520: Course Embedded Assessment

Course-embedded assessment: A technique or collection of assessment techniques that allow faculty to evaluate and improve approaches to instruction and course design in a way that is built into and a natural part of the teaching-learning process. Techniques may be used for grading classroom assignments that are evaluated to assign students a grade. These techniques may assess individual student performance or aggregate the information to provide information about the course or program and can be formative or summative, quantitative or qualitative.

Procedure: The four overarching learning objectives for the USU MBA program are incorporated into the BA 6520 course syllabus. The syllabus proceeds to outline the connection between the content and activities in the course and the MBA program learning objectives. An initial level of assessment relates to external validity; that is the extent to which the course content is appropriately matched with course content at other institutions and is appropriate to industry and practitioner expectations. The general coverage in the course, pedagogy and specific reading assignments conform to the second course in Marketing Strategy in the Wharton School’s MBA program at the University of Pennsylvania, particularly the focus on team based decision making, analytical rigor and simulation.

Techniques: Essays linking specific course content with one or more of the overarching objectives; presentations on key readings linked to an historical perspective of paradigm development in marketing strategy; incremental improvement of team position on the simulation exercise; and overall class achievement on the course long simulation exercise.

Measurement: Essay--the class is divided into four groups, randomly. The essay topics are set to reflect concepts discussed during the first, second, third, and fourth quarter of the class with the specific requirement that students relate these concepts (and related readings) to one or more of the overarching objectives. Each student in group one writes the first essay, group two the second essay and so on. This technique means that the instructor is reading eight to twelve essays at any given time; therefore, more feedback, often focusing on the positive, can be provided more quickly. And, as the essays represent a 25 percent sample of the class, the instructor can respond generally to the class if after reading the essays it appears that some concepts may be underrepresented or misapplied to the overarching objectives. Presentations--are team based. Self-assigned teams draw lots for the order in which they select articles for presentation in class. For older articles, teams are challenged to find contemporary examples to illustrate concepts, and for recently published articles, teams are challenged to fit the model/concept into a larger strategic paradigm. The instructor evaluates these presentations according to Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive objectives (a six point scale). The four overarching learning objectives imply a level three achievement; hence, a score of three or better is good. Team Simulation--After each set of simulation decisions, the instructor acting as an industry analyst writes a review. In the review the analyst comments on what has contributed to success (or lack of it) and points out the expectations industry analysts and share holders have for the next set of decisions and outcomes. The decisions are incremental and increasing in scope. The simulation results for each team (and cumulative) from one period to the next show the strengths and weaknesses of each group, which, in turn, dictates how the instructor responds to each group as if an outside consultant. Industry Simulation--At the conclusion of the course, each team has developed a competitive marketing strategy, which can then be tested by running the simulation for several quarters without tactical changes. The share price which is calculated by the simulation for each team can be added and then averaged permitting a course to course comparison.

Outcomes: The first three measures lead to "mid-course" corrections. These measures reflect both how and the capacity for student learning. (The instructor accommodates the former by imbedding techniques related to the dominant learning styles. See: Buckingham, "What Great Managers Do," HBR, March 2005.) However, results, particularly with the essays and presentations, may be influenced by the instructor's focus or significant current events, the current economic environment, for example. The last measure is a quantitative assessment of how far students in a class were able to take and apply the course material, and it is more comparable across classes than assessment measures leading to mid-course corrections, which are subject to internal and external influence.

Results: For the most recent BA 6520 course taught (Summer 2009), the following are the outcome measures. The range in essay scores is from 8.5 to 9.7. A score of 8.7 is very good. A score of 8.2 is acceptable. Should scores tend lower on a particular issue related to the course objectives, the instructor can add some reading and/or build a focus on these issues into the simulation. While not the case with this class, nevertheless several examples from the auto industry demonstrated industry threats and were added to the class website for additional reading. The presentations ranged from 3.5 to 4.8 on Bloom's scale. Students demonstrated an ability to break down information about marketing strategy into its component parts to see interrelationships, view strategy systemically, and make appropriate connections to the four learning objectives. During the course there were 54 separate simulation evaluations after team responses to an increasing scope of marketing and related decisions imbedded in strategic positioning and linking these to financial measures of performance. On average forty-eight of these were positive at some level. Placed in "real world context" this can be interpreted that firms (groups/teams) advancing led those declining by a ratio of nearly 9:1, which is a good day on Wall Street! Lastly, for the four program locations (Campus, Ogden Area, UACPA, and UVSC) for which we have multiple course measures over the last eight years, each course was ranked based on the simulation results.