Darden is Number One School Worldwide for MBA Teaching

The Darden School is the only business school in the world to be in the top 20th percentile of MBA graduate satisfaction in teaching quality for 24 consecutive years, according to a new study published on 24 February 2012 by the MBA website Poets & Quants.

The study is based on the BusinessWeek (now Bloomberg Businessweek) satisfaction surveys of more than 83,000 MBA graduates since 1988. Darden leads the story “Business Schools With the Best MBA Teaching Faculty” by John Byrne, who launched BusinessWeek’s groundbreaking rankings of business schools in the 1980s.

“Only one school of all those surveyed over that 24-year span has scored in the top 20th percentile of teaching grades from graduating MBAs: the Darden School,” wrote Byrne. “It is an extraordinary feat achieved through the ups and downs of economic cycles, ever-rising expectations and changing student attitudes.”

Byrne’s companion article “Darden: Where Great Teachers Are Gods” goes inside the classroom of Darden Professor Yiorgos Allayannis for a discussion of the Darden Business Publishing case study “The Weekend That Changed Wall Street,” about the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. An abbreviated article about Allayannis in the classroom, also written by Byrne, appears in Fortune.com and CNNMoney entitled “What Makes a Master B-School Professor?”

To describe Allayannis’ energy in the classroom, Byrne wrote, “The 46-year-old, Greek-born professor … moves around like a human tornado, whirling this way and that, up and down the tiered steps in the center of the class, waving his arms in the air, raising and lowering his voice as if an actor on a stage.”

Dean Bob Bruner, in his 30th year on the Darden faculty said, “We take pride in being the world’s best teaching school for graduate management education. Using the triathlete as a model, we recruit faculty who teach, research and develop the curriculum.”

The Darden experience, which receives the highest marks in student satisfaction, develops principled and complete leaders through its distinctive combination of top-ranked faculty, the case study method and a tight-knit learning environment.

Byrne worked as editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek.com, executive editor of BusinessWeek and editor-in-chief of Fast Company before launching the MBA website Poets & Quants, which forms part of Byrne’s digital media company C-Change Media Inc. Poets & Quants articles are featured regularly on Fortune.com and CNNMoney.