The Wharton School - Academics

Wharton is well known for having an excellent Finance program, and the Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Strategy and Operations majors are also popular with students.

Wharton follows a hybrid teaching model, some classes are case based, others are lecture based, and many are a combination of both methods. Cases are often used to illustrate concepts that may be taught by lecture or textbook reading. Marketing and Strategy classes are generally more case and discussion based than Statistics or Finance would be. Advanced classes in all disciplines will often include cases.

The Wharton academic program focuses on skills and technical abilities. Even a marketing or strategy class will require “running the numbers " and most students have strong quantitative background and skills. Upon graduation from Wharton, every student should have the skills to run a basic statistics regression or build a financial model, which tends to make Wharton graduates immediately useful in the work force.

Curriculum

The Wharton curriculum starts with a Pre-Term session before a new student's first year of official classes. Every student follows the same core curriculum during first year, and then selects a major program of study for the second year of elective classes. Wharton uses an auction system for elective registration.

Pre-Term
Wharton's academics start with pre-term classes for new first year students. Pre-term is now required for all incoming Wharton students, while in the past it was optional. The curriculum consists of "Math camp " which prepares students with rusty calculus skills for the mathematics qualifying exam every student must pass. There are additional introductory courses in Accounting, Statistics and Economics to prepare new students for the demanding first year curriculum. None of the courses are graded or count towards a students' overall GPA.

First Year: Core Curriculum
Every Wharton student is assigned to a "Cohort" of about 60 fellow students in the program. The cohort attends all classes during the first year together, and is a social base to begin to navigate the large student body. Cohorts have officers to manage career information, social activities and even a "historian " to write humorous cohort news for the student paper.

Wharton encourages all students to follow the core curriculum along with their cohort, although it is possible to waive some classes if a student has undergraduate credits in the same discipline. All students must attend the core leadership class with their cohort. The classes are either semesters or quarters in duration, and offer the full range of MBA course offerings.

Learning Teams are a further subset of the Cohort, and each student is assigned to a group of 5 or 6 to work on group projects together. The Learning Team consists of a representative mix of male, female and international students. Because Learning Teams are assigned, the interpersonal dynamics are hard to predict. Learning Teams can bond closely and continue friendships into second year, or be incredibly dysfunctional. Either way, it's a great way to learn how to work together in a team, and exposes students to a group they may not otherwise know well.

Second Year: Majors and Electives
Most students choose a major in the second year of classes. For many students, the major naturally emerges from the choice of electives the student is interested in. It is also possible to have a dual major or an individualized major.

Electives are more advanced or in depth classes in Marketing, Strategy, Operations, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Legal Studies, and Ethics as well as a few cross-registered classes that deal with more than one academic area.

The Auction System

Many students have a great deal of anxiety over Wharton’s auction system for elective course registration. Each student is assigned a set number of points to use in the auction, and points are added for each class that is completed. In general, the more popular classes can "sell " for a vast number of points, especially during second semester. Speculation in the auction is a fun recreational activity for some students, to the vast annoyance of other students.

The best advice for the course auction is to determine what electives you most desire, and bid accordingly. Bidding for the classes you want during the first round of bidding is the best strategy. Popular classes usually have a brief "bubble" in value during the middle rounds of bidding. Wharton offers a detailed history of bidding for each course, which allows students to have a rough idea of the "market value " of each class.