Quantitative Skill and Introductory Finance : Does Ability Dominate Attitude?

This study examines quantitative skill among 164 students in an introductory finance course. Results indicate that undergraduate Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) students exhibit alarming deficiencies in content-specific quantitative skills for introductory finance with only about one in four students demonstrating even the basic required skills. We augment extant BBA quantitative skill literature, which focuses primarily on ability, by introducing standardized metrics of student attitudes toward mathematics. We utilize ACT Math scores as direct measure of ability and GPA as an indirect proxy for ability. The Attitudes Toward Mathematics Inventory (ATMI) provides a direct measure of math attitude and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary for “work” words provides an indirect measure of math attitude. Both proxies for ability and both proxies for attitudes are significant determinants of quantitative preparedness. Furthermore, dominance analysis, a statistical technique to rank order the importance of predictors, indicates that student attitudes about mathematics accounts for more variance in quantitative performance than GPA, the commonly employed proxy for ability. These attitude measures are viable tools for assessing quantitative preparedness in math intensive business courses, such as introductory finance