Teaching Statistics in Management Courses in India 

Statistics is taught as a core course in the Management programmes leading to the degree of Master of Business Administration (MBA) or an equivalent degree in various Universities and Management Institutes in India. As a part of this course, Probability Theory, and Probability distributions are covered. The students who are admitted to this course are drawn from various disciplines; their level of understanding of mathematical concepts is not uniform, and hence, introducing concepts of the above topics need very careful planning and execution. In this paper, we outline some approaches generally used in teaching these courses, and compare the effectiveness of these approaches. We propose the use of case-based approach to teach some of the basic concepts in Statistics. We also discuss a specific case problem and discuss how this case problem can be effectively used to introduce the concept of Probability and Probability distributions. This method has been found to be quite useful in teaching Statistics in Executive Development Programmes also.