Harvard Business School - MBA Program

MBA Program

HBS offers a two-year full-time MBA program, which consists of one year of mandatory courses (Required Curriculum) and one year of unrestricted course selection (Elective Curriculum). Some students are also invited to attend two three-week pre-MBA programs that take place at the end of the summer before the Required Curriulum. Admission is highly selective, with an admissions rate of 12% for the class of 2010. The student body is international and diverse, with 67% of students who are citizens of the United States. Women comprise 38% of the class of 2010. Graduates of the Harvard Business graduate with a general management degree and not a particular specialization in a field.

The Required Curriculum consists of two semesters. The first semester focuses primarily on the internal aspects of the company and includes the courses Technology and Operations Management, Marketing, Financial Reporting and Control, Leadership and Organizational Behaviour, and Finance I. The second semester focuses on the external aspects and includes the courses Business, Government, and the International Economy, Strategy, The Entrepreneurial Manager, Negotiations, Finance II, and Leadership and Corporate Accountability.

The Elective Curriculum can be chosen from among 96 courses. The diverse selection includes courses such as: Agribusiness, Doing Business in China, Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise, Managing in the Information Age, The Moral Leader, Entrepreneurship in Education Reform, Venture Capital and Private Equity, Business at the Base of the Pyramid, Consumer Marketing, Retailing, Power and Influence, Managing Medicine, Supply Chain Management, and Corporate Strategy. The students assign each course a priority and the courses are filled through a lottery system based on student priority and class availability. Elective curriculum students can also complete a field study or independent student research project in lieu of a class. Field studies allow students to work together in a team closely with faculty members to launch a product, develop a new business, or research a real world issue. Independent student research projects provide an opportunity for a student to work with a faculty member to develop deep insights on a particular topic of interest. These options allow students to create a second year curriculum that is aligned with their personal and professional interests.

Current MBA classes have a size of approximately 900 students, divided into ten sections (A–J) of 90 students. Each section takes classes together the first year, with the intention of forming deep social bonds. At the beginning of the first year, all students are assigned to learning teams consisting of six students from different sections. These learning teams are intended to meet daily throughout the first year to prepare each day's class assignment; however, many learning teams stop meeting before the end of the second semester. Graduation rates are approximately 98%. Teaching is almost exclusively (95%) done through case teaching (also referred to as the Socratic method), where the students prepare teaching cases and discuss them in class, with a professor as moderator and facilitator. There is an Education Representative role in each section whose role it is to develop an appropriate learning environment and effective relationships between the students and faculty and between students themselves given the diversity within the section (students from a broad range of industries, undergraduate schools, ethnic backgrounds, geographies, etc.)

MBA students at Harvard are graded on a curve. In most courses, the grade consists of roughly 50% class participation and 50% final exam or paper. In a few cases (primarily in the RC year), there may be a few brief exercises or a midterm that typically account for no more than 20% of final grade in a given course. The top 15–20% of the class receive "1s" (instead of A's), the middle 70–75% receive "2s", and the bottom 10% receive "3s". If a student receives more than a certain number of "3s" in the first semester of the Required Curriculum, he or she receives an academic warning. The student is offered help, in the form of academic counseling and tutors to improve his academic performance.