Hello, VCPE-1!

Thank you for an amazing week in the course. Your prep, energy, and creativity were quite evident to our class guests. Simply put, they were impressed!

Now that we’ve had a chance to get to know each other, I wanted to write about our classroom norms and grading.

Simply put: at HBS, grades do not matter. It’s all about the learning. With our grading system, we cannot calculate a GPA, even if we wanted to. And, we do not.

In all honesty, no one cares about your grades. I don’t and employers don’t. What I care about most are: your well-being and your learning.

As such, I try to craft a classroom that maximizes your learning. As Section Chair, I repeat this often to my students about HBS: “the days feel long, but the years feel short.” I have you for only a short time and so I want to maximize the value of our time together. I believe this because of what I’ve seen in my own life and those of my Sectionmates and classmates. HBS changed the arcs of our lives.

Yes, the network is robust. Yes, the brand is quite strong.

For me, the school gave me two gifts that matter more: lifelong friendships and allyship, including with faculty, and the Case Method. The latter rewired my brain.

You are in your second year. I suspect you have changed a great deal in just 13 months. How you read, analyze, and absorb information has been altered. Your abilities to time a comment, speak in front of a large group of people, parry with an aggressive Professor, and think on your feet are greatly enhanced.

Very likely, you are more humble.

The rigors of the first year likely taught you that no one person can know everything about all things. Instead, answers are better when they come from a team that is prepped on one hand but also remains open-minded and curious on the other.

Unfortunately, brain re-wiring takes effort, and it creates fatigue. There are prices to pay for all things, after all.

But I can assure you that all the work will be worth it, and you soon will walk the stage at Commencement and in a very visceral and surreal way receive your diploma from the Dean and realize that your life has been changed forever.

Given that the Case Method requires interdependence, prep, listening, and active engagement, I will try to outline some thoughts, much of which I tried to communicate on Day 1.

Goal: Maximize your learning from each other.

My style: “Gentle pressure,” as one of you told me during office hours yesterday. I push you to make you better and to give you an opportunity to shine in front of your classmates and our guests. Our case protagonists have the power to offer jobs.

Norms:

• • All electronic devices set on silent and stowed out of sight.
  • The HBS 5 Ps.
  • “High standards, high care.”
  • If you’re going to be late, skip class; do not signal to our guests (extremely sought-after senior executives who manage $2 trillion of assets) that your time is more valuable than theirs.

Grading:

• • At the end of the semester, I create a massive spreadsheet that sucks in all the data and calculates points totals.
  • After each class, I read the scribe’s notes and assign points from 1 to 5 to each comment while my memory is fresh.
  • I give more points for those who do the numbers, “move the room,” or show courage. Remember: raise your hand if you’re only 20% sure of the answer. Recall: what we do in the classroom is practice. The real game happens after graduation. You are like athletes getting in your reps. Because it is practice, imperfection is expected and is a good thing.
  • If you ask a question of a speaker, that counts. If you’ve spoken already in the particular class, you will get the higher points amount of the two. In other words, no double credits for both a comment and a question to the speaker in the same session.
  • Negative points for: being late, leaving mid-class, having devices out, or using class as study hall.

Thank you for reading this. Thank you for putting up with my hardo approach.

You are special in my eyes, and I am so grateful that you opted into the course. It truly is a privilege to be working with you.

“The days feel long, but the years feel short” at HBS.

Fondly,

Jo