Friday, January 16, 2009

Case Method: In Action

There's one aspect about Darden that very few schools replicate 24/7, it's the case method. The reason I enjoy the case method is because it encourages critical thinking and forces you as an individual to defend your assumptions in front of 60+ of your peers. This is what you will do in the business world every day. Sometimes you may be working with peers, other times it will be superiors, regardless, you need to learn to state and defend assumptions.

"Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and\or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action."

Check out this YouTube of Darden's case method in action:

5 comments:

matt said...

Aw man, that professor is waaaaay too friendly. :) My strategy professor made some of us sink in our chairs when we went down the wrong path.

JulyDream said...

I actually had P-Rod for Econ last quarter, he is absolutely amazing!!! Very nice indeed, but also VERY smart and pushes you to the limit. :)

Anish Goyal said...

Really nice. The prof and students were quite engaging. are all the classes and profs like this?
and by the way, during my research on Darden (I applied there), I found that Darden employs case based learning to a large extent...like HBS. can you plz tell me approx how much %age of one course's classes are case discussions and how much %age is theoretical learning?

JulyDream said...

I'd say 95% of my classes have been like this. Every so often you get a prof who can't drive the conversation as well as P-Rod does, but it's rare.

Darden is 100% case-based with a number of technical notes and external readings on theory to supplement the cases.

So far, I've thoroughly enjoyed the means of learning and can't imagine studying any other way.

Anish Goyal said...

Thanks for the info!! sounds good.
a case based learning would also be more enjoyable once u go to school after quite a few yrs of exp.
Hoping to be part of Darden community...but don't know why adcom hasn't changed the status of my app from pending review to something forward!