Thursday, October 02, 2008

Marketing Exam on the Horizon

My marketing exam will be available for download or pick up in a little more than 12 hours. To most, that probably sounds funny, but for Darden, it's a treat to have take home exams. Darden and the greater UVa community have a student enforced Honor Code. Without getting into the specifics, basically, we are all bound by the honor code and there is no grace area within the code. One strike, you're out. This means that at 8 am tomorrow, my marketing exam will be available for pick up (or download). Students are given 7 hours to complete the exam, of which only 5 hours may be used to actually work on the exam. Each student will write down the time they start and from that moment on, every minute that passes, even those minutes for breaks is counted as an exam minute. At the end of 5 consecutive hours, the student needs to stop writing, period. If it is discovered that student used more than 5 hours, the student would go to the honor board and likely face expulsion. Exams are open book/note, however, we are not allowed to surf the internet for answers/content related to exam questions. Additionally, we are not allowed to collaborate with anyone on the exam. I think you are allowed to ask clarifying questions, but a response should not have the ability of being interpreted as helping the person answer the problem. Again, not abiding by these rules could all be construed as violations to the honor code.

As for the actual exam content, I've been told that it is about 50% or so quantitative, which bodes well for me as I have difficulties deciding where a company should strategically focus their marketing efforts, but I'm often comfortable with numbers. It seems the test will also require case comparisons, which is something I will have to take as it comes. I'll admit, I'm not extremely nervous. There is material that I would like to review, however, there's not much to "study". It's different than undergrad as we've been building on concepts for the last 5 weeks. We know what they are, we just have to prove to our professors that we have an understanding of the concepts. Wish me luck!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good Luck JulyDream! You'll do great.

Anonymous said...

I hope you did well! It's kind of nice the way they broke up your finals this year.

Speaking of honor system, I'm actually going to be on jury duty for an honor trial tomorrow. Should be interesting.