Academic Rigour and Curriculum -3

One of the very few pains of being at ISB is the continuous, unhealthy and hostile barrage of assignment submissions you have to face every other day. You have classes on the first four days of the week and from Thursday evening to Saturday evening, it's party time. Professors diligently ensure that you have enough work in the form of case analyses or a truckload of mathematical problems to solve throughout the week and especially in the weekends.

One of the current students say "As the deadline for assignment submission approaches, the population density in the library and the atrium markedly increases - innocent guys facing testing times stoically. Printers start getting busy and start failing due to overload. Frustrated groups of students hang around them checking their print jobs in the printer queue. IT Services guys start getting d-looks from us. And then when finally the much awaited prints come out, it's a total mess figuring out who gave which print. Finally the right ones are assembled and we head towards the "blue dropbox" kept for submission of assignments. Sometimes they get jammed with an overload of assignments too. Assignments, Speaker series, Events, Classes, Presentations."

The process of selection for elective courses is based on bidding system subject to the number of seats avaialble for the course. You bid for it and you get it if you have bid well enough and if there are enough seats to accommodate you in the class for the course. Though this sounds a bit weird but it’s a fair procedure. The course selection and bidding for the elective terms is something you will understand more when you are at the warfront here to experience it. True to the spirit of free markets the course allocation for the elective terms takes place through competitive bidding, each student is allotted a total of 4000 points which is the currency for bidding. In one of the current student's words "While term 5 bidding went over peacefully with most of the people getting the course they wanted and also getting them cheap, term 6 bidding proved to be a sharp contrast. The hottest course is “Corporate Controls, Mergers & Acquisitions”, almost the entire campus bid for the 165 available seats for the course, and true to expectations the cut off bid crossed 1000 points. Courses like “investing in private equity” and “pricing” also came close with the cutoff’s crossing 500. Some are worried they have spent all points they had, while some are disappointed they didn’t spend enough… call it the play of demand and supply or just exorbitant exuberance… its still by far the most efficient way of allocating scarce course seats….. that’s free markets in action".

Some of the major electives offered by ISB are Branding, International Finance, IT Strategy and Economics, Pricing, Sales management, Consumer Behaviour, Corporate Control M & A, Financial Statement Analysis, Investing in Private Equity, Marketing Research, Advertising, Corporate Risk Management, IT Services Project Management, Marketing Strategy and economic analysis, Global Issues in IT management, Indian Financial system, Managing Strategic Partnerships, New Product Development and Retail Marketing……

You have a course by name "Planning an Entrepreneurial Venture". It’s more of hands on than a classroom course. You have to form groups of 2-3, then bring up an idea and start working towards it. This would involve most of the course that you have been taught till then. You would have to do a market analysis for the segment you are targeting and then draw some figures from it to show the idea's viability.

You have lots of round table discussions. Assignments of many courses are time consuming and they take lot of your energy. As many of alumni said, most of the times you get 4 to 5 hours to sleep. You have Class Particpation for which some of the course have marks as well for CP.

In November I attended Healthcare and Pharma Summit. In the introductory lecture by the Dean, Ranga Rao, he said that the entire arrangements for the summit have been made by the current students. He also said that it took almost one month preperation before the summit could start.

I read in some of the ISB blogs that some people play games like tennis at 2:00 am in the morning. I should say, based on the experiences of Alum and current students, that most of them were not sure where to go?" and only at the end of Term 6 that they would be very clear and sink in that "this is it".. "this is where I need to go"..