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The case for putting a simulation in your course.
What adopting professors say makes it workable, what students take away from it, the evaluation study behind those claims, a decade-long assessment by a department that had no hand in building it, and the published research all of it came from.
Why professors adopt it
Ten reasons it survives contact with a semester.
Simulations earned a reputation for being a burden — installation, compatibility, data collection. Those were real problems, and they are the ones this was built to remove.
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Support from the people who wrote it
You deal directly with the author of the simulation, not a publisher's support queue. Questions about classroom use get answered by someone who has taught with it.
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Nothing to install
It runs in a browser. All it needs is internet access and a password. Faculty passwords come by email request to support@shootformars.com.
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Running a period takes seconds
One click of the Run Simulation button. Students enter their own decisions and pull their own results. There is no data to transfer, collect, or merge.
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No technical expertise required
Professors who have never run a simulation before find the learning curve for administering one practically nonexistent.
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Students find their way around it
Decisions go straight into a form; results come back as reports. Moving between them is intuitive enough that class time goes to the decisions, not the software.
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Any time, any place
Students decide from the lab, the dorm, or home. You can run a period from your office or a hotel room at a conference. That makes it workable for distance courses, even across time zones.
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Any class size
Running ten simulations is as easy as running one. Mass sections split into several concurrent simulations that can be grouped and run together with a single click.
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No compatibility problems
Because it lives on a server, it is never out of sync with school or student equipment, and there is no operating system to support.
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It is there when the class is
A simulation is only useful if it answers on the night decisions are due. Availability is treated as a feature, and it is monitored.
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Built by someone who taught with it
These simulations come out of decades of teaching with academic simulations — mainframe, then microcomputer, then internet. The design reflects what that experience taught about what actually works in a classroom.
What students get
Ten things they take out of the course.
A simulation supplements a textbook the way cases, role plays, and projects do. Each method has merit; in combination they do more than any of them alone.
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They improve their problem-solving, decision-making, and analytical skills.
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They develop group management skills.
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They apply course material in a real-world setting, which makes them more receptive to the course content.
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They work in a changing environment, and learn why adaptive behavior and corporate change are necessary.
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They feel the interaction effects between decision variables — the thing that is hardest to convey in a lecture.
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They engage in active, discovery learning.
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They are exposed to a competitive environment. For many business students this is an eye-opener.
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They experience the managerial side of a marketing or sales career, and make better-informed choices about it after graduation.
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They report more fun, excitement, and interest in the course.
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Responsibility for learning shifts from the professor to the student — from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side.” That shift is where the learning gains come from, and it gives the professor's time back for higher-value work.
The study
Rated against the textbook, item by item.
Evaluation questionnaires went to five sections of Sales Management at two universities. 151 students rated the textbook and the simulation on the same statements.
| Statement | Textbook | Simulation | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Made me think | 5.82 | 8.18 | +2.36 |
| Should continue to be used | 6.36 | 8.17 | +1.81 |
| Made the course more interesting | 5.48 | 8.15 | +2.67 |
| Is a useful learning tool | 6.43 | 8.13 | +1.70 |
| High level of personal involvement | 5.59 | 8.07 | +2.48 |
| Overall very positive | 6.39 | 8.01 | +1.62 |
| Improved decision making | 5.71 | 7.97 | +2.26 |
| Kept me interested | 5.40 | 7.95 | +2.55 |
| Improved analytical skills | 5.62 | 7.84 | +2.22 |
| Applied what I learned in class | 6.45 | 7.81 | +1.36 |
| Improved problem solving | 5.61 | 7.81 | +2.20 |
| Helped me learn concepts | 6.54 | 7.72 | +1.18 |
| Taught the fundamentals | 6.58 | 7.70 | +1.12 |
| Helped me understand sales force management | 6.50 | 7.68 | +1.18 |
| Helped me retain knowledge | 6.28 | 7.54 | +1.26 |
| Opportunity to develop team skills | — | 8.18 | — |
The last statement was asked only about the simulation; the textbook has no comparable item, so no difference is reported.
Independent assessment
Ten years of it, at a university that didn’t build it.
Joe Chapman and Russ Wahlers ran the sales management simulation at Ball State University for more than a decade and wrote up what they learned. Neither is an author of MARS. Their paper is worth more than anything on this page, so here is the part that flatters us and the part that doesn’t.
What they concluded
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The simulation is
an excellent learning tool to incorporate into a sales management course,
and they recommend it. - The main benefit is analytical and problem-solving skill: students have to decide what information is useful and combine reports from several places before committing to a quarter.
- Students set quotas by working the numbers themselves, rather than reading about quota setting.
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Running it costs the instructor little. In their words the work to run and
supervise the simulation is
very minimal
once it is set up. - Students prefer it to lecture and case analysis, and say the simulation makes the lecture material easier to follow.
What they’d change
- Students want to hire, fire and talk to their reps, and cannot. The authors answer that a simulation is not a replica of the job — but it is the most common complaint they hear, and it is a real gap in the model.
- Some teams never work out the right contest prize, even by the end of the game. Left alone, a lost team stays lost.
- Students who took the course earlier pass strategy to students taking it now, which gives some teams an unearned start.
- Most students do not read the manual unless a graded quiz makes them.
- The usual group-project frictions: uneven contribution, and finding a time to meet.
How they ran it — a 15-week semester
- Simulated years
- 416 quarters; three is too few, five starts to repeat
- Pace
- 2decisions per week, so a year lands every fortnight
- Students per firm
- 3–4they ran it in teams; MARS is now one student per firm
- Firms per market
- 4–5MARS now sizes these for you, at about five
Their four-year recommendation is now the length MARS supports: a section runs up to sixteen periods, and stopping earlier is entirely normal. One thing has changed since they wrote, and we have left their figure as published rather than restating it — each student now runs a firm of their own instead of sharing one with three classmates. Their pacing advice survives that: two decisions a week still lands a simulated year every fortnight.
Chapman, J. & Wahlers, R. (2017). The MARS Sales Management Simulation: 10+ Years Later. Association of Marketing Theory and Practice Proceedings. Read it in full — open access, and not hosted by us.
Published research
The papers behind the claims.
Conference papers and published research on the pedagogy and efficacy of using a simulation in a classroom setting. PDFs.
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Sales Management Simulation: Bringing Reality to the Classroom
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The Pedagogy and Efficacy of Using a Sales Management Simulation: The MARS Sales Management Simulation Experience
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The Pedagogy and Efficacy of Using Internet-Based Marketing Simulations: The MARS Simulations Experience
Next step
Ask for a password and look around.
Instructor access is free and carries no obligation. It opens the manuals, slides, and test questions, and puts working simulations in front of you so you can play a few periods before deciding anything.
Write to
Dr. Robert W. Cook
Author, MARS Simulations
Tell us your school, the course, and roughly when it meets. You should have your password within a day.