Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/58063
Covering the Spread A standalone course on spreadsheet modeling teaches students skills they can use throughout the business curriculum— and on the job. by Stephen Powell and Robert Shumsky A critical part of an MBA's education is learning how to build busi- ness models that are adaptable to real-life situations. It's particularly useful for students to learn spreadsheet modeling techniques, which allow them to make mathematical models of relatively unstructured business problems and organize them via a spreadsheet. Such mod- els help them think through a problem and even determine what data will be most useful to solve it. Unfortunately, many business schools do not offer in-depth instruction on the art of spreadsheet modeling. Spreadsheets are generally covered in basic account- ing or finance courses, but rarely do schools devote a separate class to teaching how spreadsheet modeling can solve a wide array of business problems. Some administrators dislike modeling, remembering it as a cumbersome and difficult part of their old management sciences course; but today spreadsheet modeling can be a dynamic and vital part of any business curriculum. At the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire, we believe spreadsheet modeling should be a central component of MBA educa- tion. Our standalone course provides students with skills they later will use in a variety of classes—and, ultimately, in the working world. Spreadsheets in the Curriculum For schools that recognize spreadsheet modeling as an essential skill for their graduates, the challenge is to design a compelling, comprehensive course offering lessons that can be used throughout the curriculum. At the Tuck School, spread- sheet modeling skills are covered in our required decision science course, which is followed by a separate statistics class. We tackle several fundamental questions: What is a mathematical model? What should and should not be included in a model? What is the difference between a parameter, which is something outside the manager's control, and a decision variable, which is within the manager's control? The spreadsheet course is divided into three roughly equal parts. In turn, we focus on spreadsheet engineering, optimization, and simulation. Spreadsheet engineering: In this module, we emphasize the careful implemen- tation of mathematical models in spreadsheets. We want students to learn to develop spreadsheets that are not only correct and useful, but also produced efficiently. Many of the course's spreadsheet engineering ideas are intuitive 46 BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2007