Department of "What Were They Thinking?"

I'm back.

Unknown University has a new initiative.  They want to encourage more "interdisciplinary" research.  So, they're trying to hire in groups centered around "big" topics.   So what do they call this approach?

"Cluster Hires"

It's too easy.   I'm not going there.  

The 7 Habits of Spectactularly Unsuccessful Executives (and Deans)

Just came across this article (The 7 habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives) in Forbes. It seems like the same characteristics can be applied to Deans (and College Presidents), since they're just executives of a different type. Read the whole thing, but here's the 7 habits (in some cases, I've edited them a bit)

1. They see themselves (and their organizations) dominating their environment
2. They identify so completely with the organization that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interests
3. They think they have all the answers
4. They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind them
5. They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image
6. They underestimate obstacles
7. They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past
   

I've known deans that embody 2, 3, 4, and 6. How about you?





http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/02/the-seven-habits-of-spectacularly-unsuccessful-executives/

Winding Down The Semester at Unknown University

It's Saturday afternoon, and I'm in my office writing final exams while the rest of the Unknown Family is one state away at a nephew's birthday part.

So that means it must be the end of the semester.

I have one day of classes left and two exams to give - one in my principles class and one for my student-managed investment fund class. and both exams are well on the way to being written. So, I'm in better shape than I have been at the end of the semester than in a while (I'm usually doing the mad scramble for the finish line). I figure another day's work on the exams and a couple of days grading, and I'm done until the next crop comes in.

It's been a good semester. My principles class went better than it's gone in a long time. I always try to give my students their money's worth, and push them significantly harder than in the other sections of the class. In prior semesters, they'd griped about this to the Powers That Be.

This semester seemed different. Part of this was that I have a much better attitude about life than I had previously. Most people who know me would characterize me as enthusiastic (sometimes to a fault) and optimistic. While the Unknown Son was in the final stages of his illness, I was very stressed (ya think?). When I'm stressed, I get more than a bit sarcastic, and that never plays well with students (particularly when you're really pushing them).

This semester, I was unabashedly positive and relaxed in the class. I also spent much more time early on framing their expectations. So, there was very little griping to the folks in the Dean's office. Finally, I made a concerted effort to make sure the focii of the class were working problems (and making THEM work problems) in class until they couldn't take it any more, and forcing them to participate. The students seem to have gotten the message that an easier road in class is often not the the best option.

Unfortunately, we don't do a common final exam for the principles class at Unknown University. Anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that my students have a better grasp of the material than in some of the other sections, but I'm always leery of making statements like this because of biases in my own perceptions (confirmation bias, hubris, and so on). I'd like to see if hard data shows that they know more, or if I'm just convincing myself. Maybe next time I can convince them to go the common exam road.

My student-managed fund class also did better than I expected. I always fear the worst as they're getting read for their end-of-semester presentation to the Alumni. This semester, we made the presentation it at the offices of a major investment-management company. The students did well, so it should help with placement of our grads at this firm in the future. I brought a couple of juniors who will be in the class next semester along to the presentation, and one of them might have made a connection there (with an Unknown University alum who already works at the firm). So, he might have made a major step towards scoring an internship for this summer.

In any event, I've had enough office time for a Saturday. So it's time to head out for some Christmas shopping and then settle in for the big UFC fight tonight. Since the Unknown Family is out of town, I get to do the bachelor thing.

It's Time To Bring The Crop In

It's that time of the semester - exams are done, projects are in (with one exception) and it's grading time. Some highlights/low lights:

• My Student Managed Investment fund was a weak group, and they never seemed to "get with the program". As a result, they did a lot of the work for the end-of-semester presentation to our advisory board in the 11th hour.
  
• Having said that, they did a pretty good job in the presentation. Not as good as last year's group (that was probably my strongest group in the last 5 years), but good enough
• My Investments class did terribly on my final exam. On the one hand, it means that grades will be lower than expected. On the other, since grades will depend a lot on the curve, it allows me a lot of flexibility.
• I have THREE students that will be returning for my student-managed investment fund class next semester (they're three of the better ones, too). This makes my job a lot easier.
  

On non-job related things, I'm mostly trying to put in enough miles on my bike so that I'll be ready for the Hole In The Wall Gang Angel Ride. It's a relatively hilly 50 miler, and, while I'm pretty sure I can finish it, it'll be ugly. So, I'm trying to squeeze in a few more 25-30 milers in the next two weeks. It's a good cause (check out the link above.).

Unfortunately, yesterday involved a pretty hard 26 miler followed in short order by my 1 1/2 hour "Yoga For Stiff Guys" class (fairly strenuous yoga done in a heated room). BY the end of the day, I was beat to the bone.

Oh well - back to grading those last few student projects.

The Default Major

A colleague just pointed out a great article in the New York Times, titled "The Default Major". Here's a few choice pieces:

Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college on a national test of writing and reasoning skills. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than students in every other major.

...

Donald R. Bacon, a business professor at the University of Denver, studied group projects at his institution and found a perverse dynamic: the groups that functioned most smoothly were often the ones where the least learning occurred. That’s because students divided up the tasks in ways they felt comfortable with. The math whiz would do the statistical work, the English minor drafted the analysis. And then there’s the most common complaint about groups: some shoulder all the work, the rest do nothing.

“I understand that teamwork is important, but in my opinion they need to do more to deal with the problem of slackers,” says Justin Triplett, a 2010 Radford graduate who is completing his first year in Radford’s M.B.A. program. From his perch as a teaching assistant, he estimates that a third of students in the business school don’t engage with their schoolwork. At Radford, seniors in business invest on average 3.64 hours a week preparing for class, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement.

...

One senior accounting major at Radford, who asked not to be named so as not to damage his job prospects, says he goes to class only to take tests or give presentations. “A lot of classes I’ve been exposed to, you just go to class and they do the PowerPoint from the book,” he says. “It just seems kind of pointless to go when (a) you’re probably not going to be paying much attention anyway and (b) it would probably be worth more of your time just to sit with your book and read it.”

How much time does he spend reading textbooks?

“Well, this week I don’t have any tests, so probably zero,” he says. “Next week I’ll have a test, so maybe 10 hours then.”

He adds: “It seems like now, every take-home test you get, you can just go and Google. If the question is from a test bank, you can just type the text in, and somebody out there will have it and you can just use that.”

Let's see - the students don't study as much, they minimize effort, cheat on take-home exams, and don't come to class prepared.

These sound like things I've heard my own colleagues say in the hallways at Unknown University.

Nothing new. But somehow, there are professors in my school (several come to mind without much effort) who hold the students to high standards AND get top evaluations. The common threads in their classes is that they DEMAND that students come to class prepared and cold-call from day one. And they make classroom performance (either measured by the quality of participation or by numerous in-class quizzes (often of the unannounced, "pop quiz" variety) a major part of the grade.

Of course, they work a lot harder than the other professors in the classroom, but DUH.

Students will slack, not go to class, and cheat like crazy if all the instructor does is read off PowerPoint slides and give softball take-home assignments. They're rational, after all.

I view the course design (of which the grading scheme is a major part) as a mechanism design problem. In other words, it's an exercise in putting together a grading scheme that forces the students into behaviors that I want them to engage.

For the most part, they're rational - they'll find a way to get the grade they want while minimizing effort. The trick is to set the class up so that they can't slack. Unfortunately. that's harder than the old "30% of the class grade is based on the mid-term, 50% on the final, and 20% on quizzes" structure.

But it's possible.

I Don't Work Well Under Deadlines

"I don't work well under deadlines. But without them, I don't work at all."

I heard that line about 15 years ago from my dissertation chair, and it's stuck with me.

In the last three weeks, I've sent off three papers to conferences.

• For one, I had to edit abut 40 pages or so. My coauthor (who is a theorist and non0native speaker) wrote the first draft. It's a good idea, but the writing needed a lot of work. We sent it off to the American Accounting Association Meeting. We also sent it off to a regional conference, because the school whee one of my coauthors works at counts these things.
  
• A second is a paper that's been floating around for a while. It needed one final going over before submitting to a journal. We realized a week ago that the initial version had been submitted to the Financial Management Association (FMA) conference and rejected a year ago. This version has a lot more stuff in it and is much more polished. However, I hadn't gotten around to making the last few changes to it. So, I finished them and sent it off to the FMA conference. Now it just needs a little more work and we can submit it to a journal.
  
• A third piece involved a paper we'd talked about with a graduate student. It involves a cross-breeding of his dissertation data and a previous paper done by the coauthor from the paper above. We got the dataset from the student with ten days to go before the deadline, and I started writing things up while my other coauthor started the data analysis. Somehow, we produced a 30 page paper with decent results in that time. It also got submitted to FMA. It still needs work, but I think we can have a journal-submittable version in a month or so.
  

Final tally - three papers submitted to 4 conferences in a span of about 2 weeks, followed by 12 hours of solid sleep.

Now I need to finish edits on a short piece that has a conditional acceptance. There's no deadline looming, but I'm in the groove from the last couple of weeks, so I'm here at the College on MLK day.

Dilbert on "Meeting Pirates"

I wonder if Scott Adams has been spying on our faculty meetings?

Blogging Has Been Light

Blogging's been light lately for a couple of reasons (and probably will continue to be for a while). School just started up at Unknown University and anyone in academia knows that the beginning of the semester is always crazy. In addition, I have THREE preps this fall (I typically have two preps, but one of the faculty went on sabbatical, and I got his class - a new prep).

Most important, I've come to the conclusion that I have to focus more on my research. I have a number of project that are "close" to completion, but it's better to have ONE completed and submitted than THREE that are "close". So, for the fall semester, I'm trying to work on only one project at at time until it (or at least my part of it) is done. I've tried to "juggle" projects in the past, but that ends up with me spinning my wheels. For me, multitasking just doesn't work.

To give you an idea as to what's on my plate:

• I just finished a paper to submit to the Eastern Finance Association annual meeting - it's a regional conference, but i go more often than not, since I have a lot of friends in the association. The deadline is today (in about an hour), but it's done and submitted. Now we let it sit for a week and then give it another go-round.
• Next on the line is a couple of days' work on a paper that's being presented at the FMA meeting in about a month's time. All I have to do is write up a short section of the lit review, so it should be done by Friday.
• Then I put in about a week's work on a third paper. I've done most of the empirical analysis except for one part. Once done, this goes to my coauthor who does the writeup.
• While I'm waiting for one or the other of these things to come back to me, I work on creating a data set for another paper.
  

Somewhere in there, I'll be juggling three separate classes. Interestingly enough, one is a "practicum" (the student-managed fund, one is a case class (advanced corporate finance), and the third is a straight lecture course (fixed income and credit markets). Since each class demands a different teaching style, this semester could get interesting (and possibly the beginning of a good case of multiple personality disorder).

In fact, I have some students who are taking all three classes with me, so we'll either end up on very good or very bad terms by December. Either way, it should be interesting.

Advice From A Journal Editor

Here's a very interesting and informative piece titled "Edifying Editing" by R. Preston McAfee (former co-editor of AER and editor of Economic Inquiry). It's not entirely applicable to finance because he's an econ guy. But there is a great deal of similarity between the fields. Here are a few things that stuck with me:

1. He cites a paper by Dan Hamermesh (1994), who discovered that, conditional on not receiving a report in 3 months, the expected waiting time was a year. So, if you want to endear yourself to editors and you're a reviewer, get stuff done quickly. I know that the longer I wait on a referee report, the less I feel like punching it out.
2. Around 25% of the to AER during his tenure were rejected due to poor execution. That is, the paper represented a good start on an article worthy topic, but provided too little for the audience. I recently was discussing a former student (and current coauthor) with a friend of mine who edits a pretty good journal. His comment was that my friend does good work, but "needs to finish his papers". Unfortunately, my friend often sends papers out to journals to get feedback from referees. That's what colleagues are for.
   
3. He feels like a a surprising number of papers provide no meaningful conclusion. Don;t merely reiterate your introduction in the conclusion. The introduction is to motivate a problem and summarize your results, and the conclusion is your opportunity to tie things together and make some parting shots.
4. He feels that submitting a paper where the editor has deep expertise usually produces a higher bar but less variance in the evaluation.
   

All in all a very worthwhile read. So read it here.

HT: Marginal Revolution

Things You Wish You Could Write On Students' Papers

Here's a pretty good list of things I wish I could write on some students' papers, from Sapience Speaks. #6, while harsh even for this list, is my favorite. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

1. "You certainly have a way with words. A long, long way."
2. "You seem to be attempting a very delicate approach to the assignment--so delicate, in fact, that you fail to touch on it at all."
3. "Every one of the words in this sentence is utterly devoid of meaning."
4. "I can't help feeling that you treat the ideas in your paper much as a black hole treats its neighboring star systems: forcefully and vigorously synthesizing them, you condense them beyond recognition, leading to utter destruction and chaos."
5. "like the broad swift stream / a thesaurus will go far / but yields no great depth."
6. "This paper isn't even bulls*&t. Bulls*&t has substance. This is diarrhea."
7. "I find your rhetorical strategy in this expository to be similar to that of a rhinoceros in extracting a tooth: large, blunt, and wholly ineffective."
8. "This entire page says exactly NOTHING."
9. "Every teacher wishes she could read a paper like this one. It makes the rest of her life so much brighter by contrast."
10. "As I was reading, I felt that you were trying to include in your paper every type of fallacy possible. If so, you only missed one."
11. "The level of disorganization in your paper suggests that your true topic must be chaos theory, not, as your title implied, Wordsworth."
12. "the wind speaks all day / yet with only empty breath: / you have no thesis"
13. "I'm not sure even you believe this sentence."

A Fairly High Profile (Non) Tenure Case

Inside Higher Education profiles the tenure case of Boyce Watkins, an untenured African-American assistant finance professor at Syracuse University. He was recently denied tenure.

What make his case interesting is that he's been quite possibly one of the highest-profile assistant professors at a non-tier1 school I've ever seen. He's got a list of media appearances longer than my arm (heck - longer than both arms), all of which you can see on his website here. His research record has been fairly good (not outstanding, but not terrible), with a couple of solid b-level publications (both sole-authored), and a number of pubs in lower-tier outlets.

My take is that he ruffled feathers. Whether fair or not, most assistant professor are not clear slam-dunks for tenure. Since most are therefore somewhere near the margin, the non-publishing things end up having a disproportionate impact. So, having a reputation for being a "good" colleague makes a big impact at most schools. This means having at least a few people who will have your back and almost no one who's looking to stick a knife in it.

So, I can understand Dr. Watkins not getting tenure. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I understand it.

And yes, this is one of the reasons I blog under a pseudonym. Maybe after tenure, I'll change. But for now, I'll play defense, thank you very much.

Grading - The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Sometimes I think I'm in a Godfather movie (i.e. "Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in").

Actually, it's my own fault. Last week, I had a touch schedule: lack of sleep, doing executive education, an all-day faculty meeting, and only 48 hours between my final exam and when grades had to be posted. With all that, I somehow managed to get it all done.

Or maybe not.

Turns out I made an error in my grading spreadsheet. Not surprising, since I use the excel functions quite a bit in grading - I pick the highest "n out of k" quizzes, weight the exams differently based on whether then grade on the final is better than on one or more of the earlier exams, and have a few other curves built in.

As a result, I usually spend a LOT of time debugging the spreadsheet before assigning final grades. But not this time.

So now I have to file about a half-dozen grade change forms.

Grading - the gift that keeps on giving.

With a bit of luck, I should be able to get back to productive stuff by this afternoon.

update: regrading is done - only a few grades actually needed to be changed. Now, back to research!.

Q&A With Myron Scholes

Here's a short "Crash Course" interview with Nobel Laureate Myron Scholes, conducted by Deborah Solomon.

The guy's got a sense of humor. Who'da thunk it?

A Rough Week, and A (Small) Pleasant Surprise

A rough week in the Unknown Household. My sister and mother were planning on driving down Sunday to see the Unknown Baby. Then Saturday, I got a call that my mom had had a heart attack and passed out on the floor. She's all right, and is currently resting comfortably (??) in the ICU waiting to have surgery (she has four "minor" blockages). The surgery will be either Wednesday or Thursday. So, yesterday I drove the two hours to the hospital to visit her. With the Unknown Baby-induced sleep deprivation, it took a fair bit of effort to make it safely there and back.

Today, I taught my classes, and was just getting ready to head back home for a much-needed nap (man - these midnight feeding are getting old very quickly) when I got a call from two coauthors (a former colleague and a former student). They told me that a paper of ours had been accepted at the American Accounting Association (AAA) annual meeting.

It was particularly good news because I didn't even know (or more likely, had forgotten) that it had even been submitted. So, it's like found money. Not a big deal, but I'll take it.

Ah well, it's midnight, and Unknown Baby has input/output issues.

Still Teaching At 96

I have a colleague who is sixty nine years old. He just finished his 39th year teaching, and last year he was awarded the researcher of the year award by my college. I've always been impressed by his passion, energy, and enjoyment at being an academic going into his fifth decade in the university. Now I know why - compared to his father in law, he's still a relative rookie.

The New York Times has an interview with said father-in-law - Professor Ernest Kurnow. of New York University. At ninety six years of age he still teaches a class or so a year at NYU. That's right - at ninety-six. I'm not that ambitious - I only plan on doing this gig for another twenty five years or so.

Then I'll retire at the relatively tender age of seventy five.

The Final Throes of the Semester

It's that time of the semester:

• Only one meeting left for each of my classes.
  
• My student-managed fund survive their end-of semester presentation to the advisory board
• I've graded and handed back all assignments except for final exams
• I've even given out and collected my evaluations
  

Now all I have to do is make up my finals, give them, and grade them.

The crop is almost in. And man, oh man is it about time.

One of the things I like about this career is that it has a rhythm to it - we have new "crops" each semester, and a feeling of accomplishment once the semester is done. But that final week or two is always a bit crazy.

So, to all my readers: If you're a student, good luck on your exams and projects. If you're faculty, hang in there - it's almost time for the break.

The NYU Finance Department Has a Blog!

NYU has one of the largest and best finance faculties around (most surveys place them squarely in the top 5 programs in terms of research output). It turns out that they now have a blog: Stern Finance.

It looks pretty promising. Although it's less than 2 months old (the first post was made on September 26), it already has a lot of high-quality content, with participation from a pretty large nuimnber of the faculty. Just this last month, it has posts by Viral Acharya, Marti Subramanyam, Edward Altman, and Joel Hasbrouk among others).

It's definitely one to add to your feed reader.