Nermin Eyuboglu
Professor of Marketing
Baruch College
Ted Joyce
Professor of Economics
Baruch College
June 11, 2014
This brief report compares the performance of students who took Marketing 3000 (MKT 3000) in the spring of 2012 in a traditional lecture format with those who took the class in the fall of 2013 in a hybrid format. Professor Nermin Eyuboglu of the Marketing Department taught both classes.
Overview
In the traditional lecture format, students attend two lectures per week, each 75 minutes in length. In the hybrid class, students met once a week. On the “off” day students were responsible for reading the assigned chapter and doing a series of online exercises, cases and quizzes that accounted 20 percent of the students’ overall grade for the course. The hybrid class focused more on applications of concepts than in the traditional class. However, in both classes the midterm and final consisted of 50 multiple choice questions.
Results
Selected characteristics of students in the two formats are shown in Table 1. Overall there appears to be reasonable balance in the distribution of characteristics between the two formats. For instance, 65 percent of students in the traditional class have a GPA of 3.0 or better as compared to 66 percent of students in the hybrid class.
Table 2 shows the distribution of grades based on a 100 point scale. Again there are no obvious differences in either the midterm or the final. The same is true in Figures 1 and 2 which shows the histograms by format for the Midterms and the Final.
As a more formal test we regressed students’ grades midterm and the final on a dummy variable that is one if the student took the hybrid and zero otherwise. We then included a set of controls for gender, GPA, cumulative credits taken, along with the Math and Verbal SAT scores. For students who were missing an SAT score we used the mean value of the known scores. The results in Table 3 confirm what we observed in Table 2 and Figures 1 and 2. There is no association between taking Marketing 3000 in a hybrid format relative to a traditional one. This holds after adjustment for measures of student performance, gender and experience. The only statistically significant predictor of student performance is the student’s GPA prior to the class. The coefficient indicates that for every point increase in a student’s GPA, the score on the midterm or final increases by at least 7.6 percentage points (p<.01).
Discussion
This brief report uncovered no significant difference in student performance in a traditional versus a hybrid format of MKT 3000. The strength of the analysis was that each class was taught by the same professor and that we were able to control for baseline differences in student academic performance prior to the class. This conclusion is preliminary but we hope to perform similar analyses on other section of MKT 3000 in the future.
T1: Characteristics of Students in MKT 3000 by Format
T2: Distribution of Grades on Midterm and Final Exam MKT 3000
Figure 1: Distribution of Midterm Grades (0-100) by Format in MKT 3000
Figure 2: Distribution of Final Grades (0-100) by Format in MKT 3000
T3: Association between Hybrid Format and Students’ Grade (0-100)
on the Midterm and Final Exam: MKT 3000 in 2012 & 2013
*Note: The dependent variable is the student’s grade in MKT 3000 based on a 100 point scale. Models in columns (1) and (3) have no controls; the Model in columns (2) and (4) controls for gender the students GPA prior to class, cumulative credits and their Math and Verb SAT scores. *p<.05, ** p<.0