IMPROVING QUANTITATIVE COMPETENCY: INTEGRATING MATH ELEMENTS INTO MARKETING COURSES

Abstract

ABSTRACT Quantitative skills are a highly-sought skillset for today’s graduates. However, students often misperceive marketing as a soft-skills discipline, leading to a crisis of confidence when faced with quantitative components within the discipline. The Quantitative Competency Development (QCD) innovation aligns with AACSB learning assurance standards, ensuring students develop quantitative competency in areas relevant to current business practices. QCD introduces an outcome-based learning process to incorporate valuable quantitative skills into any course. Through the use of an online publisher platform, students gain foundational quantitative knowledge. Class time is then used to reinforce knowledge and build technical skills using Excel. Finally, concept mastery is tested through formula-type exam questions within the LMS, which varies question inputs by student, resulting in each student needing to calculate his or her answer individually. Formulaic problems reduce the benefits of cheating in that values vary for each question and each student. As an added benefit, professors can easily identify students who upload exam questions online. Results show that students are motivated to learn the concepts and competency improvement is demonstrated. Challenges related to implementation are discussed, followed by an overview of the adaptability of the process throughout the marketing curricula. Guidance and consideration for developing formulaic questions in LMS systems is also provided.