Fifth set of results in!

It’s been a long time since we didn’t receive any results. It doesn’t mean we were idling: we had the exam in Management Accounting and Control just after the new year and we had to give back two papers on Human Resources Management late in January. The results we received today are for Management Accounting and Control (the course already appeared in this blog, about TCO). As usual, here is the graphical representation of the results distribution:

The shape looks somehow like a bell this time (except for its tail on the left). The A+ is back, congratulations! Unfortunately, some Fs appeared too :-( Anyway, congratulations to everyone!

Prof. Roodhooft’s publications on TCO

For the last session of transparency creation in management accounting and control, Prof. Roodhooft talked about his favourite topic: total cost of ownership (TCO) in purchasing management and strategic sourcing. Here are three papers he talked about during the class:

• The first Belgian paper in HBR: A Smarter Way to Buy by Zeger Degraeve and Filip Roodhooft, June 2001
• The Cockerill Sambre paper: Effectively Selecting Suppliers Using Total Cost of Ownership by Zeger Degraeve and Filip Roodhooft in the Journal of Supply Chain Management 35(1): 5–10 (12/1999)
• The use of mathematical programming models for strategic procurement (case at Usinor) in the Journal of the Operational Research Society 56: 51–59 (2005)

There are lots of other references in his webpage at Vlerick (suggestion for the webmaster: add links to the actual articles, it will make everyone’s life more easy).

Feel free to add your links in the comments below if you have anything else …

And results are in!

The results for the Financial Accounting exam are finally in! I could have done better but I passed :)

We were also blessed to receive the nice grade distribution … Congratulations to the one and only outstanding A+ student! And also all the others, of course! We did it!

1st MBA exam: done!

I wrote “done!”. I didn’t write “passed!” :-)

The first exam of the year was in Financial Accounting, a course given by Prof. Dr. Filip Roodhooft. It was a no-surprise exam: 3 questions (all exercises, like previous years), calculator allowed (and not the one on your smartphone!), any books and notes you want allowed, 2.5 hours. Just as announced. The tip to succeed? It was also announced by Filip Roodhooft: do all “P” exercises in the reference book (Financial Accounting by W.T. Harrison, 8th edition). After the exam, Roberto confirmed all the questions were very, very similar to exercises in the book. A word to the wise …

If you take a MBA exam for the first time, the most difficult thing (IMHO) is not the volume of things to learn (anyway it’s an open book exam, remember?). I believe the most difficult thing for a first MBA exam is the management of time. At the beginning, I think all the 1st year students were very happy to sit in Auditorium -1.01. Classes are interesting. Professors always digress a little bit with impact or examples in the news. It’s all very easy. But I think some of us were surprised by the speed at which exams and papers arrive. On one side, it’s very handy to have an exam to take or a paper to submit 2 weeks after the end of one class. On the other hand, 2 weeks, it’s very short! Time management, it’s called. Time management, here I come!

So, what’s next? So far, we have:

• A paper to submit (I/O Psychology) in a week,
• An exam in three weeks (Economics), and
• Another paper to submit (Corporate and Managerial Responsibility) in 5 weeks.

(And with this I don’t count intermediate papers 2nd year students have to submit too.)

Photo credit: Resistant by 96dpi on Flickr (CC-by-nc).