College of Business
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/19
The Mission of the Jake Jabs College of Business & Entrepreneurship (JJCBE) is to provide excellence in undergraduate and select graduate business education.
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Item Software applications course as an early indicator of academic performance(Academic and Business Research Institute, 2013) Benham, Harry C.; Brown, F. William; Bielinska-Kwapisz, AgnieszkaThis study’s objective is to determine if students who were unable to successfully complete a required sophomore level business software applications course encountered unique academic difficulties in that course, or if their difficulty signaled more general academic achievement problems in business. The study points to the importance of including a software applications course early in business schools’ curriculum and examines factors associated with a applications course early in business schools’ curriculum and examines factors associated with a success in the course, as well as in students’ early college GPA. An examination of the characteristics of the students who do not successfully complete the business software applications course, and a comparison to the local predictive Major Field Test in Business (MFT-B) scoring model, suggests that over 84% of the unsuccessful students would be likely to receive an MFT-B score below the 50th percentile of an institutional normative distribution and 45% would be expected to score in the bottom 20% of that same distribution. Students who failed the course were predicted to score 23% lower on the MFT than comparable students.Item The impact of intellectual heterogeneity on academic performance in business education(Academic and Business Research Institute, 2012-07) Brown, F. William; Bielinska-Kwapisz, AgnieszkaThis study extends previous lines of research which have identified academic achievement determinates among undergraduate business students by analyzing the impact of intellectual variance on business education. A quantile regression approach is utilized to estimate whether the returns on certain student characteristics, most notably the variance in intellectual ability as signaled by ACT score distribution across student cohorts in undergraduate business programs, differ along the conditional distribution of their Major Field Test in Business (MFT-B) test scores. A systematic examination of the relationship between academic ability (using the ACT as a proxy) and academic achievement (measured by the MFT-B) found no significant effects of either hetero- or homogeneity in academic ability variance on academic achievement for high ability students. There was also no support for contentions that high ability students might be disadvantaged by the presence of low ability colleagues. Quite interestingly A positive and significant effect was found for lower ability students from 20th to 50th percentile of the MFT-B distribution. While intellectual or academic ability, as signaled by the ACT, certainly appears relevant in terms of individual achievement, there is no indication that an admissions policy which creates cohorts with heterogeneity of innate intellectual ability has any significant impact on the academic achievement high ability individuals and may in fact benefit lower ability individuals within that cohort. Limitations and further research opportunities are discussed.