The Impact of Course Integration on Student Grades

Abstract

Universities are implementing strategies designed to help students develop an integrated view of business functions. In this article, the authors investigated the effect of such an integration strategy at one school. They documented its effect on student performance by comparing grades in a set of courses taken individually with grades in the same courses taken as an integrated block. The results indicate that grading rigor did not suffer in the block format and that grades were more correlated when the courses were delivered as a block. The authors hypothesized that content integration in the block courses resulted in the higher correlation of grades.