Examination chills

It started as a persistent cough that kept me up most of the night. It is not like I have not had the flu before; this was just a lot different. It starts with discomfort in your throat, and you have a burning itch to cough and clear it out. Exam fever in Nigeria is almost always mistaken for malaria. One of the best things I did for myself during this MBA was to begin to read thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman. There is a portion of the book that talks about biases and heuristics. When you have prior knowledge about a subject, your brain tries to recall from memory all that is known about the situation or issue whenever you are confronted with a similar situation. Now I guess you wonder what this has to do with the exam fever ravaging most of the EMBA27 class at Lagos Business School.

When we were introduced to particular courses, we realized that they had an unusual number of retakes. Retakers are people who are writing the course again, more like people that have carryovers for lack of a better term. This bias subconsciously creates a picture in our heads that this particular course must be challenging. This same notion was carried into all of the classes, was the basis of the lack of confidence in the quality of assignments done, and drove increased class participation.

When your mind is already fixed on a reality, it becomes near-impossible to convince it of an alternative route. All this being said, it is relatively reasonable to conclude that the increasing report of fever among classmates is the fear of ABP.

The week of the exams is upon us; ABP is among the first batch of exams on the timetable. I have been contemplating leaving every other course and following the direction my fear is pointing me to by focusing 80% of my reading time on analyzing business problems. As I said in my earlier post, all the courses in the business school are interrelated. I could read up on some parts of Corporate Financial Accounting (CFA) and Data Analytics (DA) while revising for ABP. To analyze if an alternative is favorable for a company, you might require a considerable amount of data from its financial position statement and profit and loss statement (income statement). The information can generate several financial ratios that can tell you about the company, its overhead, and its business strategies. On the other hand, the information gotten from the analysis is out on excel tables to enable you to manipulate the data for transmission. Excel proficiency was the first course in data analytics that we were taught.

The combination of knowledge from both courses is supposed to allow ABP to become a breeze, but this is not the case. I am still battling exam fever coupled with a 3+ malaria plasmodium parasite. I keep reminding myself that great men have passed through this same school, and I know that the knowledge I will garner from here will be life-changing for my family and me.

Thank you

The Prince of Business