Fontainebleau, 4 March 2004

Dear All,

Time for another update. Just finished the first chunk of exams yesterday.
I think it went pretty well. Four exams in three days, and the others even had five!
Pretty intense, but very efficient.

Quit challenging exams, testing not only our understanding of the theory
but also whether we were able to apply it in new contexts.
Apparently, the professors had been asked to make the exams harder,
not to make it more difficult to pass but on the contrary to make it easier.

The reason for this is that INSEAD like many other business schools work with the so-called
"z-curve", where grades are awarded on a relative basis, ensuring that they reflect a normal distribution. If you do sufficiently bad you can even get a negative grade!

To fail a course you need to be 3 standard deviations below the mean. The harder the exam, the lower the mean and the lower the chance of failing. Typically only 1% fail. However, you also need to receive a certain minimum average. In practice this means that 10-15% will need to retake one or more courses to improve their average, in principle no matter how well they did in absolute terms.

The smarter the students, the harder it is to pass. According to INSEAD, the level of the students (measured in terms of GMAT average) has been increasingly substantially over the last five years (apparrently only Stanfard has a higher average now. This may be the reason why so many student were stressed out.

I was somewhat surprised to discover how hardworking many of the students are, spending their evenings and weekends in the library. You may be surprised to hear it from me, but I actually think many of these people here takes these exams a little to serious. At the end of the day, we are hear to learn and to meet a lot of people, not to do well on the exams. But maybe they are just afraid of flunking the courses. Very different atmosphere compared to the first month were people seemed extremely relaxed.

No parties for almost three weeks! Can you imagine :-)
Instead I went skiing to Chamonix for a weekend (pictures available at http://www.jonasholm.com INSEAD). Great weather and great people. Nice to get a way for a change.

Also managed to check out Hotel Costes in Paris for the first time (I'm sure most of you know the CD's). Definitely one of the coolest restaurants/bars I have ever been to. Cool people (and not at all pretentious or touristy like e.g. Budda bar which you may also have heard of) - and of course very cool music. Don't miss it next time you are in Paris!

Enough for this time. As some of you know, I'll be back in Copenhagen for the weekend. One of my best friends is getting married Saturday. I'm flying in tomorrow afternoon and will be having dinner with some friends Friday night. Call me in case any of you want to meet up in the city later on. Would be great to see you, especially those of you not coming along Saturday.

Look forward to seeing many of you at the Wedding.

Best wishes to all of you.

Jonas