This is the story of a breakthrough in competency-based quantitative business education. Begun in 1991 as part of a college-wide effort to revolutionize business education instruction. The foundations of the new approach were the following four competencies: Teamwork, Communication, Creative Thinking and Adapting to Change. The introductory quantitative methods course occupies a critical position in a competency-based curriculum. An effective quant methods course must challenge students to enlist quantitative techniques to solve business problems and establish a lifelong link between data analysis and business decision making. Like many other business programs, we formerly gave responsibility for teaching business mathematics, descriptive statistics, and probability to departments outside the business college. As elsewhere, we were deeply concerned that business math and basic stat courses were generally ill-suited to our business curriculum needs. For example, out business curriculum made little use of material from the business calculus course required in our program. We also discovered that anxiety about these quantitative courses were so high that many students postponed taking them until right before graduation. By requiring a course whose material was seldom applied, the not so subtle and erroneous message was sent to students that fundamental math, stat, and probability is not useful in business. For competency-based education to be successful, quantitative learning must be effectively linked to the rest of the curriculum. First, only quantitative tools directly useful to solving fundamental business problems were to be included in the new course. To obtain this core of tools, we surveyed our business faculty to identify critical methods and concepts most needed by students in each major business areas. Next, we designed an entirely new course around this essential core of quantitative tools. Finally, a revolutionary textbook was developed that fosters quantitative learning through the four business competencies and emphasizes these core methods and concepts. After several years of classroom trials and student feedback, Fundamentals of Quantitative Business Methods is the end result of this process. This text, now in its third edition, helps students identify how each of the four competencies relates to mathematical and statistical reasoning and business modeling techniques. Some problems and cases may also be used to develop teamwork skills through cooperative learning. By working and studying in teams, students can better assess how well they understand the material and can help each other to learn critical problem-solving skills.
