I just got the aha moment, and since it’s too late at night to share my joy with anybody at home (everyone is fast asleep for quite a while now), I will spill my joy in this blog.
There are two events that lead to the moment. Chronologically the first one was on Wednesday, when we received our results for the graded quiz in Financial Accounting II we had had in class a week before. We got our grades and professor gave us the mean and the standard deviation for the grades on the quiz, so we could roughly estimate where we are standing in the class, based on the quiz.
The second event was today. I was spending some time in the evening reviewing material for tomorrow’s mid-term exam in Decision Making. I was going over the material and the problems we have had so far in the class.
By the end of the review I just realized that I can apply the knowledge from the Decision Making class to my score on Financial Accounting quiz. Instead of just understanding that I am within one standard deviation from the mean, I realized that I can calculate the exact percentile I am in (as exact as assumption of normal distribution allows).
That was really a revelatory moment for me. So I cranked up my Excel and entered all the necessary information in the Normdist formula, i.e. the mean, the standard deviation, and my personal score. Voila! Now I know to the fraction of the number what percentile I am in.
I am really happy that I was able to see the connection and the application of the theory to my real life situation, instead of just solving problems from the textbook. For me this is the real value of MBA – the classroom knoweledge is readily transferable to everyday business and personal situations.
As for my grade and percentile on the quiz, it’s another story. Let’s just put it this way – it’s too embarassing to share. Or to be on the more optimistic side – I still have something to work on.
A side note about that Accounting quiz. On Thursday I had another class together with quite a few classmates from my Wednesday Accounting group. I asked three of them at separate moments how they excelled on the quiz. Amazingly enough, all three independently from one another replied in exact same way: “Shoot!” You can easily deduce it was not “oo” in the middle.
