Optimizing Course Content

We were recently forced to spend some time on a committee re-evaluating course content of our department's graduate Production Management course. As is usual in such meetings, we quickly reached a point of diminishing returns, with the discussion going round in circles. However, since we were Management Scientists, we put the situation to good use by constructing a mathematical model of our problem, which will be presented below.

This is a neat theoretical application which is quite weak on data, since the value curves depend on the individual professor's subjective assessments. However, it proved to be a useful way of organizing our thinking about a controversial situation.