Giving marks for class participation is inefficient, unfair and offers an excuse for poor teaching. It is not allowed on the Cambridge MFin. * The majority of business schools include class participation in grading of students, typically 20-30% of the total mark and sometimes more. The justification is that it rewards the type of behaviour that… Continue Reading
Category Archives: University of Cambridge
Nice new cafe opens in Cambridge
Feeling guilty about the way that working on the first draft of my book about nuclear power in the UK is squeezing out blogging at present, here’s a quick one on a new cafe that recently opened and which brings something new to the crowded and mostly well provided Cambridge cafe society. I’m not talking… Continue Reading
Letter from Sanya
A group of us from Cambridge visited the resort of Sanya in China’s Hainan province, to take part in the annual Sanya Forum and launch our China Advisory Council * The Sanya Forum can be loosely thought of as a sort of Chinese Davos, though confusingly China has its own official summer Davos meeting. It’s a… Continue Reading
Would you choose a degree based on a newspaper’s ranking?
In mid-June 2014 the Financial Times (FT) will publish its latest rankings for Masters in Finance degree programmes. The Cambridge MFin may be included for the first time. The FT rankings are divided into exclusively post-experience programmes (where prior work experience is required for entry) and pre-experience (where it is not). Last year there were… Continue Reading
How useful are teaching evaluation scores?
In recent weeks I have taken part in meetings to discuss: student feedback on MFin teachers; teaching procedures across all programmes at Cambridge Judge Business School; the selection of winners of annual teaching prizes; and the results of a Cambridge University teaching and learning review of CJBS. In all four the main information used to assess teaching quality… Continue Reading
Letter from Shenzhen
I have at last visited Shenzhen, one of China’s four first tier cities (along with Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen’s neighbour Guangzhou), as part of the Cambridge EMBA International Business Study Trip. It’s a likeable and impressive city, much greener and cleaner than Beijing and less crowded than Shanghai. It’s also the centre of the Chinese… Continue Reading
The Raspberry Pi takes Manhattan
Every self respecting computer system has its own magazine and now it seems the Cambridge-grown Raspberry Pi has one too. The photo shows a segment of the crowded magazine shelf in Barnes and Noble’s shop in Union Square, New York, taken on a recent trip. The magazine even seems to have CJBS official yellow lettering.… Continue Reading
Seed cake, Madeira and the start of term
Perhaps only in Cambridge and Oxford would you observe the Vice-Chancellor of the University, dressed in full academical regalia in the fine surroundings of the Senate House, discussing advances in biomedical research, graphene and materials science. Today being the first weekday of Michaelmas term, there was a meeting of Congregation in the Senate House. This… Continue Reading
A great day out: TEDx Oxbridge 2013
Yesterday I went to Oxford to attend the third TEDx Oxbridge event, out of curiosity, a desire to learn how to be a better speaker and to hear some interesting stuff – and to just get out of Cambridge for a day. I managed to achieve all of these goals and was very impressed with… Continue Reading
A tense time of the year in Cambridge
Undergraduates at Cambridge do their final exams in late May and early June. No matter how well they have done in the rest of their three years at Cambridge, their degree class (*) will depend entirely on their performance during a couple of weeks right at the end of their ninth term (or for a… Continue Reading
The future of Oxbridge
Despite the mostly friendly rivalry and healthy competitiveness between them, the universities of Cambridge and Oxford are far more alike than different. A neutral visitor to both would be struck by their similarities, the differences largely consisting in geography (Oxford city is larger, denser and surrounded by more attractive countryside than Cambridge, which has a… Continue Reading
The death of distance
About 20 years ago I was invited by the High Mistress of St. Paul’s Girl’s School to give a talk to the sixth form. St. Paul’s Girls is an academically selective and expensive school in the posh enclave of Brook Green in the otherwise not very posh Hammersmith district of west London. It is one… Continue Reading
Random trials as a guide to policy
Experiments are the normal way in which science advances. You investigate whether A causes B and by how much, controlling for all of the other things that might make B happen. In the laboratory this is relatively easy. But in social science, where people are involved, it’s much harder. It’s very hard to isolate one… Continue Reading
In the not so bleak midwinter
One advantage of being an academic is that although you have no less work to do than people in “normal’ jobs, you have more choice of when to do it. So, after a long Sunday afternoon of marking, reviewing an article and sending dozens of emails, I felt like a walk. It has been snowing… Continue Reading
The next phase of Cambridge University’s growth
In August 2012 the University of Cambridge got planning permission for its £1 billion expansion in the area known as North West Cambridge, which is a roughly triangular shaped area of land bounded by the M11 motorway to the west, Madingley Road to the south and the existing urban development along Huntingdon Road to the… Continue Reading