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1. Introduction
Today, most middle-skill jobs, requiring a high school diploma, demand proficiency in spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel. Burning Glass Technologies, a labor-market analysis company, reports that millions of job postings include competency requirements in Microsoft Excel (Weber, 2015). Business school students are expected to know the basics of managing and analyzing data before they even start their college coursework: with the increasing demand for spreadsheet skills, many business courses now integrate practical applications through Excel-based case studies, projects, exercises, and other assignments. Some universities require students to pass a third-party certification course before graduating. Formby et al. (2017) surveyed multiple stakeholders, including advisory boards, employers, and students themselves to identify Excel skills that are important for students to have upon graduating from college.
The literature provides examples of how Excel (and similar spreadsheet tools) can be utilized in a classroom across disciplines (see e.g. Ragland and Ramachandran, 2014; Bradbard et al., 2014). Many business school instructors recommend and share Excel-based materials to integrate into the course and improve students’ ability to bridge the gap between theory and practice. However, business students struggle to perform simple tasks, such as navigating around workbooks and worksheets; manipulating columns and rows; or formatting data. Willis (2016) discusses that students in her course have different degrees of Excel knowledge, and it becomes challenging to develop spreadsheet projects that meet student needs. More critically, Ragland and Ramachandran (2014) found a disparity between college students’ and accounting employers’ perceptions of the Excel competency of new hires. These examples point to a need for students to acquire spreadsheet skills early in their college careers in order to be able to leverage technical competency for learning concepts and obtaining internships. This is consistent with the policy of many universities (including ours) to provide students with technical competencies necessary to be productive workers the first day of an internship or job.
Generally, undergraduate business school programs require an introductory-level finance course covering fundamental concepts, including time value of money, asset valuation, and capital budgeting. When utilizing Excel (which we use as a proxy for spreadsheet software in general) to teach these topics, an instructor assumes that students have some primitive spreadsheet skills, upon which they can build practical financial applications. If...