This new curve is good news for all students — especially freshmen still calling themselves ‘pre-Haas’ — but it’s only going to be applied to classes starting this spring. Previous courses taken at Haas still fall under the old curves of 3.2 and 3.4. Being Berkeley kids, though, this simply isn’t enough. Revolution must be called for! Take action against The Man! Haas kids were so outraged at the fact that this policy is not being applied to previous semesters that they went so far as to create a Facebook event in protest.  We can picture the dean now, calling in all the troops and barring his doors now that the online world is in on the fight for curve equality.

The event was created as a forum to spread awareness of the change and get people to take action through means like letter-writing. They call for everything taken from fall 2011 — the last three semesters — to get that GPA boost, because that’s when a majority of those affected started at Haas. After all, with the competitive open business market ahead of them after graduation, we can imagine they’d want the highest GPA possible to up their job odds and not have to face the “Less than exemplary from one of the best business schools in the country?! For shame, we can’t hire you.” At least, that’s what we think business execs would say.

Do you empathize with the business kids? Wish your mean curve was higher? Or are you one of those English majors who don’t even know what it means for a class to have a curve? Whichever the case, keep an ear out for Haas friends complaining or rejoicing over the change! Thanks to the Clog, you can now chime in and sound extra smart about business-y current events. Not a bad way to spend a few study break minutes, if you ask us.

Contact Erum Khan at ekhan@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter @erumjkhan.

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In 2011, the mean GPA for Haas undergraduates was capped at 3.2 and 3.4 for core classes and electives, respectively, in order to ensure consistent grading across courses. Effective May 3, the caps have been raised to a mean of 3.4 for core classes and 3.6 for electives.

Prior to 2011, professors would often teach the same courses at the same time but have differing grades by section — an example of grading inconsistency the caps aim to resolve, said Haas associate professor Don Moore.

After 2011, many students expressed discontent over the caps, saying they created a more competitive and stressful atmosphere.

“I certainly saw a few of my fellow students suffer along the perception that it was too much work to go from a B to an A,” said Tyler Wishnoff, a Haas senior and Haas Business School Association president.

Strict guidelines led some students to enroll in classes with perceived lenient grading — ones they might not be interested in — with the expectation that they would get better grades, Moore said.

To resolve issues with the 2011 cap levels, faculty looked at historical average grades at Haas and other departments at the university, job prospects for students and grading policies of comparable institutions, Moore said.

“The entire goal was not to adjust average grades but set the average consistent with historical averages,” Moore said.

The amended policy applies to all current undergraduates, including graduating seniors and incoming students, said Richard Kurovsky, executive director of marketing and communications at Haas.

However, some Haas seniors are petitioning for retroactive application of the new grading policy, saying they have been negatively affected by the strict GPA guidelines since 2011. They are asking Haas to either retroactively reweight GPAs, add notations to outline Haas’ grading policies to their transcripts or allow Haas faculty to make exceptions to the cap at their discretion, according to Moore.

Faculty members will discuss retroactive adjustment of grades under some circumstances, but at this time, the schedule for this discussion has not been set, Kurovsky said.

“Retroactive application on all classes sounds great ideally, but pragmatically, this is really hard to implement,” said Shahryar Abbasi, a Haas senior and current ASUC external affairs vice president. “At academic institutions, policies change — it’s not feasible, every time a policy change occurs, to retroactively apply it.”

Contact Christine Tyler at ctyler@dailycal.org.

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The Berkeley Business Academy for Youth, a program run through the Center for Young Entrepreneurs at Haas, will add 20 seats for international students as part of its International Berkeley Business Academy for Youth program.

“The way we are thinking about this is we want to give young kids a chance to be exposed to the Berkeley culture and the Berkeley environment,” said professor Teck Ho, director of the Asia Business Center and the faculty sponsor of the international program. “I’m from Asia, and I always think that Berkeley could do a lot more internationally to increase our brand presence and serve our alumni better.”

Ho said the program includes a hands-on team business project, visits to local companies and guest speakers from business-related fields. The additional 20 international students will live in university dorms and take classes with American students at Haas.

The original U.S.-only program, B-BAY, is in its fifth year and will run from July 1 to 12. The all-day program is open to 40 students and is taught by undergraduate and graduate students at Haas, according to the program’s website.

Olive Davis, a director with YEAH, said that students this year have come from across the country and all over the world, with locations including Taiwan, Canada, Utah, Virginia, India and China.

“In this first phase, we’re actually doing Asia and Canada right now, but we’re hoping to go to India and Chile and other places where the university has attracted students,” Davis said.

Although students pay a fee for the program, Ho said accessibility is important.

“We want this program to be accessible to everybody,” Ho said. “Obviously, you have to pay a fee for it, but in the long run, we want to give out scholarships to people who can’t afford it. We are not doing this to make money. It is a good way to energize the alumni and increase our brand presence globally.”

In addition to its summer programs, YEAH offers year-round programs for under-resourced sixth- to 12th-grade Bay Area youth. Proceeds from the summer programs allow the year-round mentorship programs to be offered free of charge to participants.

Mitchell Handler covers academics and administration. Contact him at mhandler@dailycal.org and follow him on Twitter @mitchellhandler.

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Well take that analogy and insert it into a badly written political cartoon, because that’s the story unfolding in several prominent school districts up and down the state, including some in our very own Bay Area. A lot of the money that was supposed to go into things that are essential for the basic development of children — i.e. food — went into things like sprinklers for the Berkeley School District. In their  defense, sprinklers produce water, which is also said to be important to human existence.

But who’s to say that this has only been confined to the secondary schools? What’s stopping this epidemic of reappropriation from extending into the university sector, specifically our beloved Cal? Let’s say you’re the average freshman student stuck in the dorms with a meal plan. The standard version costs $1,250, so assuming that all 4000 students purchased one of these, it would come out to a nice round $5 million. To make you realize the extent of the existing problem, the school districts have been mandated to pay back $170 million to cafeteria funds. A hundred and seventy freaking million dollars — that’s the equivalent of 34 freshman classes at a fully fledged public university!

Now, imagine that instead of using this money to improve the lowly-ranked quality or variety of food, they use it to add pointless construction to Haas. It’s great that they don’t actually do that, you know, because we still have some of the best late-night, vegetarian and ethnic options. Not to mention healthiest, which usually has an inverse relationship with appeal to taste buds.

The reason that it’s taken so long to uncover this malicious and literally unhealthy scheme is the lack of workers available to pore over the plethora of financial records. The existing ones are already overworked, so it’s wouldn’t be a surprise if some of this money went to making them a little bit happier. Except it didn’t. The proposed fix, in a classy move by the government, is to yell at the school districts until they simply have an “adherence to governing codes,” which shouldn’t take too long at all. You can look to Berkeley protesters for precedence — haven’t we gotten a lot done by protesting in Eshleman Hall?

As if the misappropriation wasn’t bad enough, schools also are threatening the directors they employ with termination if said directors report this to the state. With Valentine’s day come and gone, you’d think there’d be a little more love going around.

Follow Uday on Twitter at @mehtakid

Image source: Mayu Shimizu under Creative Commons

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Malmendier was the first woman to be awarded the prize, given in honor of Fischer Black, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. The award honors the top finance scholar under the age of 40 who best exemplifies a commitment to original research.

“It’s a pretty big deal,” said Haas School of Business Associate Dean Andrew Rose. “This award is as difficult or more difficult to win than the Nobel Prize.”

The award recognizes Malmendier’s work in behavioral economics, a field of economics concerned with looking at behavioral models that might explain the apparent lack of rational decision-making by individuals in economics and business finance. The field, by Malmendier’s admission, is just now entering the mainstream discourse of finance researchers.

Stanford University associate professor Stefan Nagel, who co-authored a paper with Malmendier entitled “Depression Babies: Do Macroeconomic Experiences Affect Risk-Taking?,” commented further on the importance of behavioral economics and his colleague’s research.

“Behavioral economics is about trying to see if we can understand economic phenomena by looking at the question of whether people are always making rational decisions,” Nagel said. “We are looking at factors that might affect the idealized calculating machine that traditional economic models assume.”

By “idealized calculating machine,” Nagel refers to the common economic assumption that agents in economic models behave rationally.

Campbell R. Harvey, a professor of international business at Duke University, presented the award for the AFA and cited “Depression Babies” as a key example of Malmendier’s creativity and originality in her research.

“The idea of the paper is to test the idea that the environment you live in impacts your risk-taking, so people that experience the Great Depression have different risk attitudes than those that did not,” Harvey said.

While Malmendier’s results have been proven anecdotally, the results of her paper were also statistically supported, which, according to Haas finance professor Terry Odean, is not an easy task.

“Using surveys of consumer finance data, (Malmendier and Nagel) show that people that have experienced a low stock market return environment through(out) their lives are significantly less willing to take financial risk,” Harvey said.

Harvey also cited Malmendier’s research on CEOs and how overconfidence might produce rash decisions, saying that this research provided convincing evidence that individual CEO characteristics, like measured overconfidence, cause distortions in investment behavior.

“We wanted to look at the idea of optimum decisions and how psychological biases affect economic decisions,” Malmendier said.

Malmendier earned her doctorate in business economics from Harvard University in 2002 and currently holds faculty positions in the UC Berkeley department of economics as well as in the Haas School of Business. She credited UC Berkeley’s vibrant academic community for her success.

“Berkeley is heaven for studying behavioral economics,” Malmendier said. “Nowhere else is there more interest or resources.”

When asked if the prize included any extra money for research, Malmendier laughed.

“No, no money involved,” she said. “Just honor.”

D.J. Sellarole covers ASUC. Contact him at dsellarole@dailycal.org.

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MBA50, a website focused on business schools, released the rankings on Nov. 20, keeping Haas in the same position as in 2011.

“We know we have a first-rate student body, a world-class faculty and a distinctive culture that sets our students apart in the marketplace as innovative leaders,” said Ute Frey, Haas’ associate director of marketing and communications.

To determine each school’s position, the site aggregated and averaged rankings from the Financial Times, Businessweek, The Economist, U.S. News & World Report and Forbes.

The overall rankings stayed relatively similar to those of last year, with schools on the list mostly shuffling only one or two places. Haas remained behind business schools at Harvard, Stanford and Columbia but ranked higher than business schools at the University of Virginia, Cornell and Duke.

Haas was ranked seventh by the Financial Times, 13th by Businessweek, sixth by The Economist, seventh by U.S. News & World Report and 13th by Forbes.

The full-time Haas School of Business has about 490 full-time students, and more than 70 percent of graduates find employment after graduation, according to U.S. News & World Report.

Contact Shannon Carroll at scarroll@dailycal.org.

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