Making the Grade

Grades are out!

Grades for all but one subject have been released and if you look at my potential GPA so far, it falls in the "Satisfactory" band. (I've made a post regarding the grading system in the Asian Institute of Management, you might want to take a look.) By AIM standards, that means I'm average.

But does that tell the whole story? Does that mean I'm your "average" MBA student? I've done some analysis

The school segments the MBA core subjects in two major areas-- Quantitative and Qualitative subjects. Quantitative subjects include:

1. Language of Business (LOB)
2. Economics (ECO)
3. Quantitative Analysis (QA)
4. Financial Management 1 (FM1)
5. Financial Management 2 (FM2)
6. Management of Cost and Profit (MCP)
7. Management Control Systems (MCS)

The Qualitative subjects include:

1. Human Behavior in Organization (HBO)
2. Management Communication (MC)
3. Marketing Management (MM)
4. Operations Management (OM)
5. General Management & Ethics (GME)
6. Asian Business Systems (ABS)
7. Development of the Enterprise (DE)
8. Written Analysis of Cases (WAC)

If you have been following my blog since the beginning, you could see the trend of how things were going and which subjects I had struggles with. Here's my breakdown on my performance for the core subjects:

1. I fared much, much better on the Qualitative subjects than the Quantitative subjects. No surprise there. My Qualitative GPA is a full two grade notches higher than my Quantitative GPA.
2. Speaking of Quantitative subjects, I fared quite poorly on my Finance subjects (I've written a blog post before on my finance struggles). FM1 and FM2 taken together doesn't make the cut.
3. Thanks to QA, my Quantitative GPA looks more decent-- QA was able to offset my poor showing in Finance
4. The rest of my Quantitative subjects grades show that I pretty much didn't make waves on the subjects, ripples perhaps. :P
5. The Qualitative grades make things much more interesting for me. My Marketing grade is something to be proud of and it makes me eligible to take a Marketing major, although I've been over the fence on that decision as of late.
6. Another subject that I'm delighted about is HBO. I sincerely believe that the effort I put in was perceived by our professor, who happens to be our CAN Group mentor. Perhaps I was able to get across myself better in this subject that's why the good grade.
7. I'm also seeing another trend: I got relatively lower grades on subjects where I missed the most number of classes due to sickness. Fair enough, if I'm not there in class, how can I earn a good grade right?
8. I hope this puts the whole "WAC Boy" name-calling to rest: I only got a modest grade in WAC, so there. :P

So, story of my grade looks clearer now-- I struggled mightily in Finance but I was saved by my QA, Marketing and the rest of the Qualitative subjects. By all indications, I have not been able to make a smooth transition to the financial field (unlike some of my CFA classmates) but it looks like I'm a natural when it comes to marketing and management areas.

As I write this post and review my archives, it occurred to me that the blog has more or less chronicled the story of how my grades so far got "made"-- an eight month process of struggles and success and dealing with the requirements and exams. I've definitely learned a lot from inside and outside the case rooms and some of do note reflect on paper.

The report card may say I'm average, but the real story would say otherwise.