Marketing Town Hall Meeting- Unanswered Questions

Thank you to the students who came to the Town Hall meeting. The faculty is grateful that you took the time to speak with us, and we thank you for being candid about your concerns and generous with your appreciation.

Issue #1: Students are hungry for “application” in the marketing curriculum.
Within the group at the Town Hall Meeting, there seemed to be a consensus that “application” meant 1) creative production, such as creating advertisements, and 2) software products, both for creative production and other uses.

Questions about differences between advertising and marketing in the Business/Journalism Schools:

Q: Can marketing majors use business courses as prerequisites for upper level courses in the Journalism School?
A: Marketing students may enroll in 3000-level and 4000-level courses in the School of Journalism on a “space available” basis. Regarding prerequisites, the Journalism School has their own 1000-level and 2000-level courses that serve as prerequisites for their 3000-level courses for their own students. Journalism will allow business students who have taken BCOR 2400 to enroll in their 3000-level courses in lieu of having the 1000-level and 2000-level courses that Journalism students must take. However, the Journalism 3000-level course (Principles of Advertising) must be taken in order to enroll in their 4000-level courses.

Q: Can upper level Journalism courses count as business electives?
A: Unfortunately, no. While courses in other departments may have similar sounding names, they are usually taught very differently, i.e. from a creative perspective vs. a strategic/managerial perspective. Consequently, the courses are not equivalent and the journalism courses count as non-business electives.

Q: What about non-for-credit workshops on using certain software (e.g., Adobe Illustrator) that has value in the marketplace?
A: Jenni Schrader made this suggestion at the meeting. We think it is a great idea! Jenni came and met with me (Donnie Lichtenstein) and Professor Laura Kornish to talk more about this idea on Friday April 10. Jenni had the idea of a student-run workshop series. She is taking lead on this idea to determine the feasibility and student interest in running such a series of workshops. The idea might be something like this: a student group organizes the workshops, perhaps run in the Leeds School computer labs in the evenings, on topics Introduction to Adobe Illustrator, Using Excel for Composing Graphs and Charts, as well as other such topics. Knowledgeable students may conduct some workshops for their fellow students, or perhaps in some cases, an instructor may be hired. Students participating in the workshops may be asked to pay a fee for this service to go towards the cost of conducting the workshop, and perhaps as a fundraiser for the student organization. This is very much in the “conceptualization” stage, so these are just some preliminary ideas. Jenni will be investigating this further over the summer, to gauge demand for workshops on different software packages, and checking in with us periodically for counsel. If you have recommendations, questions, or want to assist Jenni, feel free to email her at Jennifer.schrader@Colorado.edu.
That said, there are other venues at CU where certain software-related skills can be gained. For example, as noted in the Town Hall Meeting, the Journalism School offers several such courses. Additionally, the Technology, Arts & Media Program (housed in Altas) offers a certificate program that entails many courses that seem to be “right on target” for the types of courses students were asking for. Click on the “courses” tab to review the semester-by-semester course offerings. You can also read a blog about the certificate here.

Issue #2: BCOR 2400 and the Marketing Capstone Course
Meetings, including Professors Donnie Lichtenstein and Laura Kornish, as well as Associate Dean Cal Duncan, were scheduled with the marketing capstone professor and the BCOR 2400 professors to discuss both negative and positive comments about the courses.
We take student concerns seriously; we want you to share them; we hope that was evident at the meeting. We find feedback the most helpful when it is constructive. We are never going to have 100% of students satisfied with every course. But, we can shoot for listening to 100% of the constructive comments offered in a helpful spirit.

Issue #3: Students discussed the pros and cons of a grade distribution; some really thought a forced grade distribution was a recipe for disaster.
The marketing faculty have spent a lot of time in the past few years talking about grades and grade distributions. Each faculty member has his or her own take on the subject, but there is a strong consensus that grade distributions serve two functions for students. The first one is that they make grades mean something. If there are too many As, then an A doesn’t signify excellence. The second one is that they set student expectations about the workload and level of challenge in the course. We want our students to come prepared to work hard. We have good students, capable of good work. Having a grade distribution is one of many ways a professor (or a department) can send a powerful message that the course will be challenging.

In addition to those reasons, departments often impose grade distributions because of some not-often-discussed realities. In particular, there is a positive correlation between the grades a professor assigns and the ratings students give the professor, and a negative relationship between the level of rigor in a class and the ratings students give professors. I just analyzed the data in the last month for all faculty in the Leeds School over the last three years and this conclusion is unambiguous. (Over 721 course sections delivered over the last three years, the partial correlation between grades a professor gives and student evaluations of the professor, controlling for rigor, is .37, p < .001). As a faculty member in this school for 21 years (including 3 as Associate Dean), it is also unambiguous that in annual faculty ratings by the Leeds School Administration, higher student evaluations of faculty have typically led to administration rating the faculty as a “better teacher.” Therefore, historically there has been an incentive for faculty to give higher grades. Thus, we are using a grade distribution to avoid the problems associated with having truly outstanding students receiving the same grades as students who are “simply good,” and students that are “simply good” receiving grades similar to students who may not be well-suited for college at this point in their lives. Q: Does this result in an unfair outcome for our students?
A: The faculty members in the marketing division do not believe that is the case. (We voted as a group to support the current grade distribution in our BCOR 2400 class. It was not a decision made by a single faculty member in isolation.) We believe the grade distributions in the marketing courses leave room at the top to recognize the hard work and accomplishments of the many gifted, hard working, and great students that we are fortunate to have here in the Leeds School and in the marketing division. And, those same distributions also leave room at the bottom for the classmates who would rather be on the slopes or spending time on Facebook, or whose work product for some reason doesn’t achieve the quality we were looking for.