# The Default Major: Skating Through Business-School



## komorikun (Jan 11, 2009)

> PAUL M. MASON does not give his business students the same exams he gave 10 or 15 years ago. "Not many of them would pass," he says.
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> Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they've always been. But many of them don't read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. "We used to complain that K-12 schools didn't hold students to high standards," he says with a sigh. "And here we are doing the same thing ourselves."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/education/edlife/edl-17business-t.html?pagewanted=all


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## komorikun (Jan 11, 2009)

> What accounts for those gaps? Dr. Arum and Dr. Roksa point to sheer time on task. Gains on the C.L.A. closely parallel the amount of time students reported spending on homework. Another explanation is the heavy prevalence of group assignments in business courses: the more time students spent studying in groups, the weaker their gains in the kinds of skills the C.L.A. measures.
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> Donald R. Bacon, a business professor at the University of Denver, studied group projects at his institution and found a perverse dynamic: the groups that functioned most smoothly were often the ones where the least learning occurred. That's because students divided up the tasks in ways they felt comfortable with. The math whiz would do the statistical work, the English minor drafted the analysis. And then there's the most common complaint about groups: some shoulder all the work, the rest do nothing.
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## Dark Alchemist (Jul 10, 2011)

Really? At my uni the Business school was pretty prestigious and hard for students to get into.

Guess it varies.


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## Noely G (Feb 19, 2012)

I'm a BA major with a focus in Accounting. Couldn't agree more with all of this


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## The Professor (Jul 31, 2011)

I'll read the 2nd post tomorrow, but I agree with that first post. I'm an accounting major (how did you know that btw?). I'm amazed how my friends do so little work and still act like they know it well and expect to do well (and do pretty decent). I used to spend a LOT of time struggling through reading the textbooks and everything religiously and I got A's, but I slipped into a major depression and am unable to exert hardly any effort... even less than my aforementioned friends now.

I'm also confused because I think I may be more interested in psych/med related fields. Help.


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## komorikun (Jan 11, 2009)

The Professor said:


> I'll read the 2nd post tomorrow, but I agree with that first post. I'm an accounting major (how did you know that btw?). I'm amazed how my friends do so little work and still act like they know it well and expect to do well (and do pretty decent). I used to spend a LOT of time struggling through reading the textbooks and everything religiously and I got A's, but I slipped into a major depression and am unable to exert hardly any effort... even less than my aforementioned friends now.
> 
> I'm also confused because I think I may be more interested in psych/med related fields. Help.


I find that the general business classes are pretty easy. The accounting classes are the only ones that really make me work hard. Intermediate financial accounting 1 & 2 are nightmares. (To answer your question: I always keep track of accounting majors on this forum,)

I like medicine way more than accounting too but it's really hard to get into nursing/radiology/DMI programs. Med school and pharmacy is even harder to get into. At the local city college here, there were 900 applicants for 100 spots in the nursing program. And the damned thing is they do it by lottery, not by GPA in the prerequisites. With accounting, they will let anyone in. It's not an impacted major but then they flunk a whole bunch of them in intermediate financial accounting (weed out classes).


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