With the first quarter of new curriculum in Stanford  Graduate School of Business now behind us, school's dean, Robert L. Joss, would like to give you a window into our Critical Analytical Thinking (CAT) class, the 14- and 16-person seminars for all entering students that are emblematic of the curricular innovation put in place this year.

It’s a Thursday night and Professor Garth Saloner has just opened discussion for his section of CAT. Students are seated in a circle on sofas and chairs. Pamela Tsai, a student from Taiwan, makes the case for ideas laid out in Jeffrey Sachs’ book The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. It offers top-down World Bank–style solutions for alleviating global poverty—the subject of the evening’s seminar. Arye Schreiber, a Cambridge University–educated Israeli student, counters that Sachs borrows too much from clinical medicine, breaking poverty into a grid of estimates and assumptions that don’t always play out as expected. “The master plan won’t cut it,” he says. “It’s like tackling several patients with one drug without diagnosing each one of them.”

Faisal Ahmed, from India, argues for a bottom-up approach in which people with field experience try different projects through in-country NGOs. Solutions that work would then be heavily funded and replicated.

This was just one discussion in one of the 24 sections of CAT. The classes were designed to develop the students’ skills in critical analysis and then in communicating their analyses on paper and orally. Topics and readings were introduced weekly, and by 11 p.m. each Wednesday students turned in three-page papers that would be critiqued by professional writing coaches and graded by their professor for content within two days. Students and professor then met for discussion.

There are no easy answers in CAT. Faculty chose their subjects to give a sense of the scope and complexity of issues. Topics included: What happened to the electric car? What should Google do in China? Should education be publicly or privately funded? Unlike a traditional case discussion, CAT teaches students how to take apart an argument, examine its parts, and then synthesize the information into a clear line of their own thinking. This isn’t a matter of making a chip shot from the sky deck and fading away. Students learn to reason and hold their ground for much longer.

Saloner, like other CAT professors, stretched students beyond their reading. In the poverty session he referenced physician Paul Farmer, who created free health care centers from Haiti to Rwanda and who recently spoke at Stanford. “How do you scale this?” Saloner asked, knowing previous discussion had illustrated an intractable problem. We want our students to think deeply about their role in solving these issues. He wrapped up: “Is this a problem about which you want to feel some ownership? Do you go into private equity and write a big check? Or do you take some time out and participate directly?”

After the discussion, Michael Armstrong, from San Diego, said the class gave him context: “You’re doing business in the greater world. It puts things in perspective.”

Smaller class size was why he chose Stanford, but he didn’t expect it would be this intimate, Evan Reas of Madison, Wis., said at an after-class taco dinner with classmates and Saloner, who hosted most of his sessions at his home. “This is a lot of give and take.”

The development of CAT, led by David Kreps, Jonathan Bendor, and Dale Miller, was a team effort by the 12 professors teaching the sections. Jim Phills enjoyed the interaction with fellow professors fed by a flurry of  emails while grading weekly essays. “We expose students to conflicting perspectives about how to address complex issues such as poverty,” Phills said. “The challenge lies in trying to construct good inductive arguments from imperfect data, and that struggle produces tremendous insight and learning for students and faculty alike.” Faculty also advised students—usually meeting each MBA two or three times during the quarter. Professors got to know students’ backgrounds and objectives before placing them into one of three courses for each of eleven required areas of study, such as finance.

The degree of risk, commitment, and innovation undertaken by our faculty to pioneer this seminal beginning for our revamped curriculum has been both inspiring and rewarding for our students—and for me.

Source: www.gsb.stanford.edu