The CBS first-year curriculum was at one time very rigid—all first-year students took all their core courses with their clusters, unless they were able to pass an exemption exam. Students complained, however, that this rigid core curriculum meant that they could not specialize prior to their summer internship, so CBS made a change and revealed its new core. Since 2008, first-year students take full terms of “Corporate Finance” and “Financial Accounting” and half terms of “Statistics,” “Managerial Economics,” “Strategy,” “Marketing Strategy,” “Operations” and “Leadership.” In the second semester of the first-year core, the curriculum involves half terms of “Global Macroeconomics,” “Decision Models” and “Managing Marketing Programs.” Students then pick three additional half-term classes from a menu of courses in the categories of markets, performance and organizations — called flex-core courses—and any two full-term electives they wish. In order to enhance flexibility, students have the option to take exemption exams from each core course, if they believe that a certain course would be redundant for them, based on their previous classroom work or job experience. (“Financial Accounting,” “Microeconomics” and “Macroeconomics” are most frequently waived courses —CPAs and investment bankers especially tend to test out of these classes.) So, CBS has attempted to find a middle ground, where students learn what it regards as fundamentals while giving students the latitude to specialize and, anecdotally, students have responded favorably.
Read the full article: Friday Factoid: Increasingly Flexible CBS
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