So how many times a month do you...

Lepium

I'm curious how case-only schools work. When I visited your school I sat in on a marketing class, and the professor randomly called on one person to walk everyone through the case. The student did an amazing job, and she probably spent about fifteen minutes outlining her thoughts while the professor took notes. Then things were opened up for discussion.

Is this typical in most classes? If so, how often does a student actually end up being cold-called (or volunteer) to walk through a case like that? It seems like with 90 kids or however many are in each section, you wouldn't necessarily get a chance to do that very often.

Maybe Pelihu can comment as well since I believe Darden is case-only like Harvard.

Johnny, actually being cold called is a sign that you are not participating enough in class (at least at HBS). The professor will typically cold call you if you haven't spoken in about 3 - 6 classes to get you back in the discussion (that's probably 10 or 20 people out of 90 at any class). At times, though, you may volunteer to open the case.

In either case, the length of your opening depends on how much you have to say, how many follow up questions you get and how long is the professor willing to take the discussion in that direction and the professor's style. Some professors like to have more people talking while others prefer to have fewer people defending their options. It also depends on the case.

L.

Our classes run 1:25 each, and there are about 65 people per section. I'd say about 3-4 people are cold-called per class, and the 'duties' of the person called up vary with the class. For many classes, you could think of one person laying down the background and kicking off the case, another person or two addressing key building blocks or concepts along the way, and a final person who shows a model and gives a recommendation. So, the first person called on doesn't necessarily have the most challenging task, and how a class evolves depends a lot on where the students take it.

We also had a theory that contributing frequently would be a good guard against being cold-called, but I think most of us have concluded that this isn't the case. I volunteer quite a bit, and was cold-called in each of the 5 classes we had last quarter. In fact, one day I volunteered to say something, and the professor just continued with a tough cold-call. Someone in my learning team, who is in a different section and also talks a lot in class, wasn't cold-called a single time. I definitely get the sense that professors will call on people depending on which way the class is heading. If it seems like a lot of people are confused or if we're on the wrong track, they'll call on someone they are confident in to bring the class back in line. The opposite is also true; if someone seems to have the case nailed early in the period, they might purposefully try to get some other people involved to muddle the case up a little and bring in some additional ideas.

It can sometimes be tough to contribute when there are 65 eager beavers all in the same classroom, but you have to try because most classes base 25-40% of your grade on class contribution. It must be really tough with 90 people in the same room. Generally speaking, it's not left to a single person to walk the case through all the way, and we've never done anything like what GMATT described - at least not for class.

We have a 2-credit leadership comm class that meets twice a week and runs over the first two terms. (2 credits per term, as compared to 3 credits for a regular class.)

This last term (6 weeks) we did 3 formal presentations. it was sort of neat -- we did strategy analyses for our strategy class, but got grades for presenting them to l-comm. Each was 30 minutes long, followed by purposefully-tough Q&A. We also had a number of shorter, more improvisational speeches and activities. Duke is apparently known for really pushing students on the public speaking stuff.