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Business Professor Honored for Innovation in the Classroom

GREENSBORO – MBA students at the Bryan School of Business and Economics are making the grade at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro by tackling the challenges facing local businesses.

The ACID Test, developed by Bryan business professor Dr. Vidyaranya Gargeya, takes one of the staples of business education – the case study – and turns it into a timely exercise that helps local businesses as well as graduate students.

The ACID Test examines the capabilities of the students on eight different dimensions: Analysis and Application, Content and Conceptualization, Integration and Implementation, and Decision-making and Discrimination, and hence the acronym. It is the only test of its kind to combine a “live” case, an interactive guest speaker presentation, and a written exam under one umbrella.

Professor Gargeya was honored for this innovative approach with the 2003 Wickham Skinner Award for Teaching Innovation, named after the world-renowned professor from the Harvard Business School, and a $1,000 prize. The award was presented in April at the annual meeting by the Production and Operations Management Society, an international professional organization of academics and practitioners.

The main hurdle business students face with the traditional written case method is the fact that the cases are dated and the students are unable to interact with the managers of the company being studied.

“Medical students learn from studying cadavers as well as live patients with clinical practice. The traditional written case is a ‘dead’ case from my point of view. The students can learn in a limited manner from the written case,” Gargeya said. “The managers depicted in the written case may not be available for comment during class discussions. So, whenever clarifications are sought, the students turn to the professor. The faculty member may have the expertise on the subject matter, but may not necessarily have the specific details of the industry and company in the written case. The students in turn are asked by the professor to make their own assumptions. The assumptions may or may not represent reality. That would be a problem in understanding business.”

To overcome the lack of personal contact with real managers, business schools often rely on internships to fill the gap. Gargeya, however, decided to bring business executives into the classroom for crisis management in real time with ACID Test. A week before their final, students are given a background packet on a chosen business to review. In the past, subject organizations have included Konica Manufacturing, United Healthcare, Douglas Battery Manufacturing Company and RF Micro Devices, among others. On the day of their exam, several comprehensive questions based on the subject company are posed to the students. A senior executive of the business then meets with the students for an hour-long presentation and question and answer period.

“The students act like a doctor diagnosing a patient,” Gargeya said. “The executive, as the patient, can then explain additional complications that have come into play.”

After the interactive period, students complete their responses to the comprehensive questions that have been developed in prior consultations with the senior executive from the organization. The best answers submitted by the students are then passed on to the executives for use in solving the organization’s concerns.

The ACID Test has been used in Gargeya’s Global Operations Strategy course for more than eight years and has garnered many supporters. Gargeya has also used it in a graduate level course on the Management of Information Technology Services as part of the Master of Science program in Information Technology and Management.

Students appreciate the opportunity to connect with local business professionals, while the executives are pleased to gain outside opinions.

Many students in the Bryan MBA program are in their 30s and beyond; they bring business experience to the table. They also bring new ways of thinking because they are not always familiar with the practices of the profiled business.

Robert Harris Jr., president of Konica, wrote this in his evaluation of his experience in 2002:

This experience was helpful to me because the students were more questioning than my staff in certain areas of the topic. My staff had detailed knowledge of the subject and often assumed things the students did not. This gave me the benefit of having my proposal evaluated and questioned by an outside group in advance of presenting it to my board in Japan. The exercise did not change the direction I intended to take my company but it did lead to refinements in my thinking and clarification of my intent.

A former chemical engineer, Gargeya earned a post-graduate diploma in management from the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, India, and worked in the petroleum industry in his native India before coming to the United States. He obtained his Ph.D. in Business Administration at Georgia State University in 1992 and joined the UNCG faculty in 1993. He has also served as a visiting faculty member in business schools in Ludwigshafen, Germany, and Glasgow, Scotland.

“I’m in the teaching profession for a reason,” Gargeya said. “I would like to bring the practical dimension into the classroom. That is lacking in many of the programs I am familiar with. That which is taught in business schools should be relevant to the business world.”
 
 

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