Today I completed the Objective Assessment for C214 Financial Management and consequently the course. Again, the course took much longer than I had hoped or planned. Of course, since having my tonsils removed during the 21 days enrolled in the course I should probably not be too hard on myself. Whatever is said about the debilitating pain of the procedure that you may have heard is probably true. This mixed with the completion time of the previous course put me far behind my earlier hopes and estimates on program completion. Based on earlier timing I should have finished four courses in the time I finished the last two. But, I must stop myself and recall my conversation with my student mentor this past week. He was still blown away with the speed I’m progressing through the MBA. Even my completion of Financial Management in 21 days was to him a fast completion time. He literally commented that the ‘intelligence’ was not a problem for me on any of the courses and now that I’m getting my time management back under control I can accelerate again. That’s a very loose paraphrase but I’ve captured the gist of his analysis. I had a talk with my spouse about all the distractions and how I’ve been accommodating all the family demands. But the end of the term is coming and if I don’t finish by February it will cost another $3,300 for essentially one or two courses. My student mentor told me the fastest I could complete the capstone course would be four weeks due to team and course constraints. That puts me in the mind that I need to finish the next two courses this month. In light of that I’ve already started reading on the next course, Data-Driven Decision Making which interpreted means Statistics. Before I get far into that let me stop and give a recap on the prior course.
Financial Management is my day job. Literally, I’m a finance manager for a large public company. Because of that I felt almost as confident taking the pre-test cold as I did for the Accounting course. I took the pre-assessment on November 28th and passed with a 73%. I took notes during the assessment to direct my subsequent study. This, I noticed, has been a very effective strategy for accelerating through this program. I’ll note any concept around which I feel fuzzy or wasn’t expecting such detail to revisit. This helps me also mentally give importance to and memorize what I’m reading. This is part of learning how you learn. I’ve learned that my mind doesn’t care about information until it knows what is useful. Knowing something is highly likely to be on a test has a perceptible impact on my ability to read, comprehend, and memorize. Also, since one of my primary goals in this program is to complete it in a single term, anything that speeds up my progress contributes to that goal. I would say there are questions that are either the same or very similar (same words different numbers) between the pre and objective assessments, but on this last test there were many questions different. In fact, one of the concepts that was hit repeatedly near the end of the test was a concept I only skimmed over in my review. The objective assessment had a fair mix of concepts that apply to banking, investing, accounting, and corporate finance. Consider that statement. Certain concepts are practically owned by those individual disciplines with very little overlap to the others. For example, in my corporate finance job I never use present value, bond calculations, IRR, or any tax considerations. In fact my co-worker deals with cash flows for our team and he never considers the statement of cash flows or the types of cash flow in his job. Someone in personal investing probably never uses capital budgeting concepts, yet they were definitely hit in detail on the test. What I’m trying to convey is that this course covers a much more broad set of topics and does so in substantial detail. If one had not previously learned these concepts I could see him spending a significant amount of time getting comfortable with the concepts, let alone learning how to perform the calculations. This exam of any in the WGU MBA had the most calculations. This was something that became painfully evident to me during the pre-assessment. Since I had not reviewed any material previously, I found myself suddenly attempting present value calculations manually with a basic calculator and the formula given in the test. Let’s just say that is a recipe for pain and stress. I procured a HP 12C Platinum Financial Calculator on Thursday. This gave me two days to get familiar enough with the operation to quickly crunch my way through the test on Saturday. I used a HP 48G graphing calculator all through high school and college so I was already familiar and comfortable with the Reverse Polish Notation that these calculators are known for. Having a financial calculator for this course is not optional. If you know how to use the tool and understand the present value and bond yield/pricing questions they are almost free points. The calculator does all the heavy lifting if you just understand how to enter the data provided in the question. If you do not have one you will be down quite a few points on the exam wasting valuable time and brain power. Unless you are a mathematician that gets a thrill from solving complex equations by hand, you are inviting an obscene level of needless pain on yourself by not using a financial calculator. Even my beast of a graphing calculator was not set up to handle the NPV, IRR, or some of the bond questions. Grab your pocket protector because I’m about to geek out on you. With my new HP 12C in hand I started enjoying the calculations and imagining all the money I could make by understanding how to calculate bond yields and other investment calculations. While I know the investors out there understand just how naïve that sentiment sounds it is intended to convey the stark difference the right calculator makes for this course.
Financial Management is full of complex and difficult concepts that are not intuitive. Again, my extensive prior experience and status as a CPA put me in another playing field from the novice. Some of the concepts are still difficult for me to memorize and I’ll flatly state that I’ve passed the test, completed the course, and still did not memorize some of the multi-step calculations for cash flow budgeting. But if I had to I could grab a reference for any concept in this course and quickly put together the calculation or summary for professional use. In that regard I’ve certainly demonstrated competency in this subject and did so in less than 13 hours. That’s right. From pre-test to the end of the objective assessment I spent a total of 769 minutes working on this course. From one Saturday to the next I invested less than 13 hours received all 3 CU for a Masters course in Finance. (Online learning haters go read how hard it is to pass the CPA exam and then shut up.) My results are certainly not typical but also not indicative of a course that is watered down for older students. This was a comprehensive and detailed exam and I put in some focused study which resulted in my passing the final with a score of 84% (well above the cut score) in 90 minutes when the exam has a time limit of 3 hours. While my score could have been higher, the tradeoff between studying more and studying enough means I finished the course and can now move on in the program. Other CPA’s would say just as they say for the CPA exam that anything above the required passing score means you studied too much. How’s that for practicality!