Test Taking
I am sitting in room 223 of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice on the campus of University of San Diego. I am sitting here more of less quietly while sixteen students in the graduate business school program, in search of their MBA degrees are taking the final exam in my GSBA 520 Advanced Corporate Finance course. The exam has been underway for about 35 minutes so far and the student who never once appeared in class before today, but arrived to take the exam five minutes after everyone else had already begun, just got up and handed me his completed test paper. He is a lawyer by profession and from the look of his assignments and my brief look at his test paper, he is no dope. This is the guy for whom all exceptions are made. I had designated that 20% of the course grade was for class participation. He never once came to class, but was on all but three of the classes via Zoom video, something that was allowed, but not encouraged. I think he might have spoken up once during the classes he attended via Zoom, but otherwise he just pasted up a picture of himself so he could listen when he chose (or not) and still appear to be present. Until yesterday he had not sent in any of the seven short papers that were required during the semester, but yesterday and today he got them all in. I had not set specific dates since there was some optionality as to the subject matter, so he was technically not late on any of the assignment. What to do about such a student?
In theory I could mark him of up to a full 20 points for lack of participation. That and the other 5 points he had taken off on the assignments for giving me some amount of pablum on a few of the assignments, would be enough (even if he got a perfect score on the final exam) to mark him down to a C or lower grade, which in a graduate program is tantamount to failing the course. On the other hand, there are others in the class who have sat in the room but not participated any more than he did. They were physically present more, but did not contribute to the learning experience. I have been inclined to basically take off something like 5 points for that. If I did this to my lawyer student he would be sitting at the average for the course cohort at about a B+.
The method I used for the course was, I thought, quite enlightened by virtue of the fact that I gave out the final exam questions (six of them) in the beginning of the semester and told them I wanted them to “internalize” the answers they would develop over the semester such that they left the course with a better than average opportunity to take away some valuable lessons. The 35 minute exam is now a full 10 minutes faster than the next closest student submission. And the interesting thing is that he took the time to answer the extra credit question in what a cursory read tells me is a well-reasoned response that will earn him somewhere between 1-3 extra points for that. I note for the record that the second submission was unable or unwilling to answer the extra credit question. That either means he hadn’t a clue about it or he thought that 3 extra points would not impact his grade too much one way or the other. Looking at his collective scores to date in the course, I’m not sure that was a good calculation if he had any ability to answer it.
The extra credit question was a question about two Chinese companies that have been dragged back out of the global capital markets by their authoritarian government. Mr. Xi forced Ant Group, the owner of Alipay, the payments FinTech company that was about to launch an Initial Public Offering on the New York Stock Exchange making it the largest IPO in history and a company starting public life at $300+ Billion in market capitalization. 1/3 Chinese people use the Alipay money market fund to warehouse their wealth, making it the biggest investment vehicle in the world and bigger than many sovereign nations’ balance sheet. Ant Group is now owned by the Chinese Central Bank, thank you very much, and its majority owner and China’s biggest billionaire (other than Mr. Xi, of course), Jack Ma has not been much in evidence. Given that he was quite a fixture on the global finance lecture circuit, we can only assume that Mr. Xi is not pleased with him and he is somehow or another paying for his sins of getting too big for his britches. Perhaps that lawyer who finished his test in 35 minutes should note that fact should our country eventually fall into the same sort of authoritarian regime that Republicans seem to want and that Donald Trump seems to like.
The other Chinese company example that I quoted was Didi Group, which is the Chinese equivalent of the Uber ride hailing service. The whole world expects to have a ride service at their disposal it seems. Well, Didi Group actually did launch an IPO on the NYSE about five and half months ago. I guess Mr. Xi and his minions were asleep at the switch or else they wanted to set and even MORE pronounced example or others in China that might be thinking the path to billionaire status lay through the Unicorn-spawning path. Well, they just got what I like to call a “Not so fast, Abernathy” notice from Beijing telling them it was time to delist. Why at this moment? What’s worse than starving someone? How about starving someone and then putting a cookie in their mouth only to pull it out right before they bite down. In two weeks, the management of Didi would have been free to sell their NYSE-listed shares, but now they will have to seek approval from the Hong Kong Exchange, where they will be allowed to relist. Well, at least the Hong Kong Exchange is more open to the global capital markets than the Shanghai Exchange….or is it? Clearly Mr. Xi is sending a message not just to his aspiring billionaire oligarchs, but to the entire western world that “China don’t need no stinkin’ American or European capital markets”. They can fund their own growth all by themselves and seem to prefer to do so. Mr. Xi does not feel it is necessary to be beholding to anyone. He sees how his pal Vladimir can’t do all he wants to do because of the risk of having economic sanctions imposed on him and he wants no part of that program. In addition, China is truly a powerhouse economy where Russia is merely a peanut, so Mr. Xi has some basis for taking the path he is choosing to take.
I am now staring out there at three of the sixteen students still reviewing their exams. One was to be expected…she stated very clearly that she wanted as much time as I would give her. Given that she is a very sound student, I suspect that is just an abundance of caution on her part. The other two are two of the guys who were slow to submit assignments and were light on attendance and non-existent on participation. I had pegged them as the low end of the curve (sort of in the B- zone), so I’m not entirely surprised to see them working over their answers at a slow and deliberate pace.
I am glad I am past test-taking, not because I was high anxiety about it when I was in that mode (I was actually a pretty decent test taker), but because there comes a time in life when you would rather not have to be tested on what you do and don’t know. My next test is three years away when I have to go in and re-up my California drivers license. I will be 71 years old at the time and expect to be able to pass it (with or without glasses….I currently don’t need glasses). Now that is something to worry about.