Adventures with lyrical - buying a business

Cad said:

Lyrical, aren"t you also black? That"ll affect the numbers you can get accepted with pretty dramatically. At least for law school, a white guy would have to score significantly better on the LSAT to get into top schools than a black guy. Not that it matters, just since this guy is asking for comparison purposes, I think it"s fair to disclose that.

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Before this thread starts going down the path that everything was handed me for AA, I was already a Junior Exec with a direct responsibility of $200m in revenues at the corp I worked at. I had like ten years experience and five to six promotions compared to some of my white classmates that tried to get in with just two years work experience. I wasn"t really there for a pay increase, I think starting pay for U.T. at the time was 100k, and I was making 90k at the time I started. In my class, only one other guy had as much experience as I did.

At the end of the day, I was there to be a more-rounded businessperson, I wasn"t there for a paycheck, and people like me are sought for at B-schools. Of course, it would have helped my career, because no one was going to be allowed to be a Senior Exec without an MBA, but it didn"t help with pay. I didn"t need an MBA because I was a low level manager at Dell making 45K trying to make 80K a year, I was already making well over that, and they knew that when they admitted me.

prescient63 said:

The typical curve is top 10-15% get an A, the next 25-30% get an A-, 45-50% B+, and then you"re a complete fuck up if you do worse. They"ll also show you the grade distribution for each class at my school. For example in my M&A class we had 1 A, 8 A-, and the rest were B+ or worse. This class was somewhat atypical though. Fucking professor made us do an LBO with a calculator and didn"t even warn us that that is what we would be doing. Even the PE and M&A folks weren"t prepared for that silliness.

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And how often is that actually enforced? You have schools like Harvard that give like 90% A"s.

Cathan said:

I"m white but my god every time I hear about affirmative action type shit I just cringe. If anything... Affirmative action only made people more racially sensitive aka racist instead of helping smooth race relations over.

I don"t like racists and I don"t have anything to do with them. I also cringe when I hear people make racist comments. I just can"t fathom that any minority likes the stigma hanging over their heads of, "I only made it because of affirmative action when they meet someone new".

I think minorities would have been better off if they were allowed or forced, however you want to look at it, to earn their standing the hard way, without any political pressure.

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AA is tangential to this thread. I"ve always been better in the metrics I was measured in by my co-workers (hence the getting promoted every 1.5 years), and I got mostly A"s that I took from my white classmates on a forced curve, and now my income is way higher than my classmates.

Race doesn"t define one"s drive. I worked 20 hours a day to get to this point for like 15 years, and bringing up AA is an insult to me. Was I a workaholic? Sure, but it brought results and I have more free time now.

prescient63 said:

If you"re at Harvard you"re probably smart as fuck or at least good at what you do. A curve doesn"t make sense there and that"s why you get banned from recruiting if you ask about grades.

At other schools it seems to be enforced pretty well. There are some classes where they don"t enforce it here but we have distinct cut offs for grads. IE in our analytics classes 96+ is an A 92+ is an A- etc. I think you can miss something like 6 points from all your assignments so they have to be near perfect, and since the solution for everything is quantifable you either did it correctly or incorrectly. There"s no middle ground.

The problem is that people are assuming that companies care about grades, but the reality is that they don"t. Outside of consulting and investment banking nobody gives a shit.

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Funny, I was under the impression by talking with people from other schools that U.T. was one of the only schools in the top 20 that had a forced curve. And thats from talking with people at other top 20 schools. There"s really not much difference between most students at this level, and its like one of the top rated Finance professors said, since we are all so close, he has to resort to trick questions to get any sort of differentiation between us, since especially in Finance, grading has to be fair.

And yeah, no employers care about grades. I spent many a sleepless night trying to be the 15% of the class that got the A, and from all the interviews I did, only two recruiters said, "Hey, nice GPA!" Neither of them gave me an offer either.

prescient63 said:

Just for giggles I created a histogram of the grade distribution across 3 semesters of classes. To be fair I removed the analytics classes and some other bullshit classes that are pass fail (academy weeks & interview prep). It looks like the grade distribution is over represented in the A- range.

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Maybe I"m not making myself clear, U.T. hands out C"s like candy in the core classes.

prescient63 said:

My core distribution was:

A: 7
A-: 17
B+: 7
B: 19
B-: 7
C+: 1

and a few folks managed to get kicked out for being retarded.

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LOL, U.T. gives more C"s than your program gives B"s.

We didn"t have + or -, it was A, B, or C. And the distribution was like 15% A, 70% B and 15% C. There was no mercy towards this, it was a forced curve. I remember I was close enough to get an A- (like a point away), and ended up getting a B (since there was no + or - in the system). The profs have no leeway in this, the school forces it, and if a student is going to flunk out, they get flunked out.

20% of my cohort that started didn"t make it to graduation day, and its definitely a dog-eats-dog atmosphere. I know the dean of the school isn"t happy with it, because it caused alot of conflict between students. He wanted to get rid of the forced curve, and put in +"s and -"s like the other schools. I know its not perfect, but really, in a top 20 school, how do you measure super-intelligent people on a forced curve? There aren"t many true C performers when you"ve got a bunch of pre-screened, highly intelligent type A personalities.

I think in B-school, you learn more from each other people that have been successful in their industries (than the profs), if they are willing to share. When everyone is at each other"s throats, no one wants to share. Making a dog-eat-dog environment sucked, and it carried through when the recruiters came on campus. Guys would look at who was interviewing against them, go home and dig up dirt on classmates, and then crucify said classmates at the time of their interview, so that they could get the offer.

Its why some prospective students that want to go to a top 20 avoid U.T., its too cutthroat, and some of the other schools are more laid back.

prescient63 said:

So I"m not buying it and wouldn"t be shocked to see a curve that looks like ours because if anything you"re more generous with A"s.

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As I said before, the core classes are on a forced curve, the other ones are not. I graduated in 2005, and unless its changed, this is how it still is. I remember taking a class from the highest rated prof in the school (John Doggett) and he gave 87% of the class C"s halfway through the semester in an elective course. And then we had a final project that was like 60% of your grade, that he gave 1/3 of the class A"s, 1/3 B"s, and 1/3 C"s, and it was like 50% of your grade. So there was a good chance you were flunking an elective course.

Personally, given the super-smart and driven people, I don"t think a curve can be forced. I mean, most of my class was from the sciences (engineers with a top-pedigree), and to tell them that 15% of them are going to abitrarily get a C no matter their effort isn"t right.