Determinants of Success within an Integrated Business Curriculum Context: An Econometric Assessment

This paper studies an ongoing curriculum innovation at the College of Business and Economics at the University of Idaho, with junior level economics and business classes under one common team taught course, the Integrated Business Curriculum (IBC), instead of independent classes. In our study, there were six modules (classes) within IBC. The students were required to form teams, along with several other individual based academic activities. Faculty mentors provided guidance throughout the process. The student's success in IBC, measured as the grade obtained in modules, might be affected by a host of factors such as his/her own academic capacity, proxied by the pre-IBC GPA, the mentor's impact, proxied by his/her experience in the program, and the team impact, controlled by a dummy variable. To determine exactly what causes a student's success is absolutely important since the program continuously seeks to improve in a professional style with academic considerations, which was missing from the relevant literature on IBC. The data were collected from three different modules in 2001 Spring semester. After quite a few diagnostics tests in accordance with the econometrics and with the help of heteroskedasticity consistent estimation method, we searched for the factors affecting the student's success. We also conducted ordered logit/probit analyses as an alternative modeling of the grades for several reasons explained in the study. At the end, we found that the most significant factor in determining the success in IBC was still the student's own academic skills, while mentors did not differ from each other in contributing to the dependent variable. We also provided other relevant statistics and graphs supporting the findings.