The Teachers' Forum: Breaking the Mold - A New Approach to Teaching the First MBA Course in Management Science

M has been said and written about the decline of management science education in MBA programs. The results of a recent INFORMS survey of professors who teach OR/MS in business schools indicate that “only 13 percent felt the role [of management science] is greater now than five years ago. Looking five years ahead only 21 percent expect the role to be greater five years in the future” [INFORMS 1997]. Amid all of the doom and gloom that accompanies such statements, we are missing an important point. Management science is more important to business education than ever, and management science can be implemented by MBA students more easily than ever. What we require is a radical change in the way we conduct the first MBA course in management science. A number of alternatives have been suggested to reverse this trend. The most notable are to shift from intelligent consumer to active modeler [Powell 1997a], to use spreadsheets as the primary modeling vehicle [Savage 1997], to teach management science using cases [Bodily 1996], and to teach quantitative analysis with a focus on managerial relevance [Carraway and Clyman 1997]. All of these recommendations have merit and can improve the quality of management science education. They also relate to the position taken by the INFORMS Business School Education Task Force [1997, p. 36]: