MBA program in Harvard Business School

MBA program in Harvard Business School

HBS offers full-time MBA program in two years, which is a year of mandatory courses (Required Curriculum) and one year of unrestricted course selection (Elective Curriculum). Some students are also invited to attend two three-week programs pre-MBA that occur in late summer, before the Curriulum required. Admission is highly selective, with an admission rate of 12% for the class of 2010. The student body is international and diverse, with 67% of students who are citizens of the United States. Women constitute 38% of the class of 2010. Graduates of Harvard Business graduate with a degree in general administration and not a particular expertise in a field.

The core curriculum consists of two semesters. The first half is mainly focused on the internal aspects of the company and includes the fields of Technology and Operations, Marketing, Financial Reporting and Control, Leadership and Organizational Behavior and Finance I. The second half focuses on the external aspects and includes the courses Business, Government and International Economy, Strategy, The Entrepreneurial Manager, Negotiations, Finance II, and Leadership and Corporate Responsibility.

The Elective Curriculum can choose from 96 courses. The selection includes various courses such as: Agribusiness, Doing Business in China, build and maintain a successful business, management information age, moral leader, Entrepreneurship in Education Reform, Venture Capital and Private Equity Business at the Base of the Pyramid, Consumer Marketing, Trade, power and influence, General Medicine, Supply Chain Management and Corporate Strategy. The students assign each course a priority and the courses are filled through a lottery system based on student priority and class availability. Elective curriculum Students can also complete a field study or independent research project students rather than a class. Field studies allow students to work together in a team closely with faculty members to launch a product, the development of a new business, or investigate a real-world problem. Projects of independent student research provide an opportunity for the student to work with a faculty member to develop deep insights on a particular topic of interest. These options allow students to create a second year curriculum that is aligned with their personal and professional interests.

Current MBA classes have a size of approximately 900 students, divided into ten sections (AJ) of 90 students. Each section has classes together the first year, with the intention of forming deep social bonds. At the beginning of the first year, all students are assigned to teams of six students of different learning sections. These learning teams are designed to meet daily throughout the first year to prepare class assignment each day, however, many learning teams stop meeting before the end of the second semester. Graduation rates are approximately 98%. Teaching is almost exclusively (95%) done through case teaching (also known as the Socratic Method), where students prepare teaching cases and discuss in class, with a professor as moderator and facilitator. There is an Education Representative role in each section whose role is to develop an appropriate learning environment and effective relationships between students and teachers and between students themselves given the diversity within the section (students from a wide range of industries, schools undergraduate, ethnic backgrounds, geographies, etc.)

The Harvard MBA students are classified into a curve. In most courses, the grade is composed of approximately 50% and class participation or final exam 50%. In some cases (especially in the RC year), there may be some short or partial exercise usually represent no more than 20% of the final grade in a particular course. The top 15-20% of the class receive "1s" (instead of one), the middle 70-75% receive "2s", and 10% receive "3s". If a student receives more than a certain number of "3s" in the first half of the required curriculum, he or she receives an academic warning. The student is offered help in the form of academic counseling and tutors to improve their academic performance.