As the instructor for this class, I made several changes, such as covered most difficult materials in the beginning of the semester, made stream videos for almost all of the lectures, and had online quiz for each content area.   I also strongly supported weekly Study Group outside of the class, and regularly joined the Study Group to answer questions.  They all had very positive impact on students' learning of the materials and made the learning for such a difficult course slightly easier.  I sincerely appreciated the effort and time each student put into the course to make the course successful.  Ping Wang, 8/6/2009. 

How to study COB291?  Listen to what former students say and more students feedbacks.

Student comments (unedited and some unreadable words are omitted).  Each paragraph is from one student to answer questions: What did you like best about the course, what did you like least about the course, what do you think we could do to improve the course?  Overall, what was your impression of the course.

Spring 2009:

The problems are realistic, have to do with real world managerial problems and strategies.  Akit if sekf - teaching.  So much information that there was not enough class time to cover everything.  Sometimes you just had to rea the textbook and learn material yourself, although I feel like the textbook was very well written & understandable.  Make it a 4 credit hour course.  For the amount of work and time you devote to a course this rigorous, it should definitely be 4 credit hours.  I enjoyed it.  You get out of it what you put into it.

I think the material is something all business should know.  The amount of work.  I did not like having test outside of class on Wed. nights from 8 - 11.  I would have liked in class test better.  It was good but had to spend a lot of time to prepare.

Very helpful.  Homeworks were very hard.  Subject matter is very hard, but instructor put in a lot of effort into this course.  He was especially good about outside the class help and office hours.

The amount of help available if you want it.  The amount of work.  Assign less work.  Hard work, lots of time devoted, not really sure will use excel this way ever again.

The degree of difficulty.  How much it covered.  Cover more in COB191.  Good considering it was one of the hardest in COB.

A new, different subject.  The amount of busy work that took up needed time for other classes outside of the class.  Don't expect so much from students in a course that the majority know nothing about previously.  Not horrible but not good either.

Group work.  The homework length and time spend on quizzes.  Textbook change.  Challenging course but well worth the time.

The course was survivable.  The Excel homework!  I spent more time on the Excel homework for this class than I did for studying / doing homework for all of my other classes combined and I felt the homework didn't help me learn / understand the material.  Make the test earlier and make the instructions for the homework clearer.  It was a ton of work, but it was not quite as bad as I had anticipated.

I enjoyed the professor and class size (very small).  We learned the most difficult material in beginning of year rather than at end.  Very difficult, not sure how it pertains to the real world for my future career.  Less difficult, emphasize the importance of each topic.  Scared/nervous at first, but developed into an understandable course.

SI session helps me alot.  Do every homework.  Tough.

The real world application.  The amount of work was a lot. N/A.  Loaded with a lot of info.

The great examples for problems and the extra help outside of class.  The tedious amount of work.  Get a better textbook.  The course was very challenging, but very informative.

That our tests were outside f classtime, it gave us more time to work out the questions.  I also like the weekly HW and quizzes.  Reading the textbook.  I liked the way professor Wang set up his course, I would not change anything about it.  At first I thought it was going to be very difficulty but after the first couple of classes it was not so had.  The professor was interested in teaching and explained the work very well.

The way the professor set it up, getting the more difficult subject done at the begin of the year.  It took alot of time to do homework and quizzes.  Its just difficult material.  It was difficult but I get through it alright.

Ping was awesome!  Videos!  Extremely hard homework that had nothing to do with the tests.  Cut out some stuff, keep the schedule the way Ping does it, and get a better book.  At first, too hard, but I learned a lot, I am now an Excel master.

The course material will obviously be very useful when we start our careers.  The course involved a lot of work.  The textbook was confusing, I thing a better textbook would help.  The course was interesting.  Loved professor Ping Wang.  Very helpful and prepared.  Great Teacher!!!

The enthusiasm of Professor Wang.  The difficulty in understanding the material.  Explaining how to do the homework in Excel better.  Maybe require students to bring laptop once a week. 

Dr. Wang's stories.  The material.  Get a better textbook.  I hated it.  It was hard.

It was a good learning tool for the future.  A lot of Excel work.  Do more problem - solving questions and examples.  Hard content in this course.

Ping Wang and Fan Jiang Dao Hai.  The copious amount of homework.  Smaller assignments.  Ping Wang is the greatest teacher I have ever had !!!!

This was my favorite COB course because Ping Wang is a great teacher!  Move very quickly / very long time to do homework.  Slow down and give time to work out more problems in class.  Fan Jiang Dao Hai!

The time the class met.  The way the course material was presented to the class was very poor.  Get better professor to teach COB291.  It was very difficult!

Everything else besides decision analysis was ok.  Decision analysis.  Excel should be better explained.  It was a hard course.

The course presented real life applications of business solutions, which I feel is very important.  I thought the textbook was over intensive for the required course material.  I would get a custom formatted textbook for all the sections.  I thought the professor was overly adequate and extremely prepared in dealing with the subject maters.

Lot of out of class work that had to be done that really helped with the learning of the materials.  The material wasn't very interesting.  Hard course regardless not sure if there is much room for improvement.  Tough class but the Prof. made it doable.

The Professor!  The material.  Better explain how to do problems.  Hard, but a good class. 

After the final exam, students also provided the following comments about What are the areas you think the instructor did help you the most in the course? and What are the areas you think the instructor could do to improve your weakest areas in the course?

I felt like Dr. Wang really did everything that he could to help his students out with 291. He was always willing to come to study groups and had office hours available. This course is difficult but he was a great teacher to have. I think with the homework assignments, I would like to see more assignments regarding things that are on the test. The excel stuff did help, but when you cannot work on excel during a test, I feel like an assignment more like the test would be better.

Always avaiailable through e-mail and so willing to help inside and outside of class. Notes on line were very useful, and the videos as well. length of howework and quizzes sometimes took all week to do, other than that no complaints

Amazing knowledge of the subject. Explaining the fundamentals of each topic a bit better.

I believe by going through the course materials out of order, as a class we were able to perform better and have more time for other classes at the end of the semester. I also feel the instructor gave us tons of resources to study from which helped on the very difficult tests we had to take. Spend more time on test 2, I feel this was the hardest material and we spent the least amount of time on it, we could have spent an extra week on this subject matter and I think the grades on this test would have improven.

The instructor was very helpful when we had questions. He went over everything until we understood it. he also involved us in class discussions to help us better understand the material.

The instructor helped with test review more than anything else in the course. He made sure everyone was prepared and did not surpise us with anything on the test. The instructor could improve on preparing us for the assignments. The assignments took hours upon hours mostly because I did not know what was being asked to be done in the assignment.