StatTools^® is the New Standard for
Darden MBA Students

STATISTICS ADD-IN ENHANCES UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA BUSINESS PROGRAM

Ithaca, NY - November 16, 2004. The Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia has selected Palisade Corporation’s StatTools as the standard statistics software for all its MBA candidates. Ranked 12th in the Wall Street Journal’s 2004 overall ratings of graduate business schools, the Darden School has made an “integrated and innovative curriculum and course materials” a core goal in its mission. With the adoption of StatTools, Darden joins the growing ranks of universities using the Palisade statistics package. Other recent adopters include Pace University and the University of Indiana.

“We’re proud StatTools can help the school meet its goals,“ said Palisade president Sam McLafferty. “The faculty at Darden have been using Palisade’s decision support tools for a long time, and we consider their adoption of StatTools a strong endorsement of the product.”

Dr. Phillip E. Pfeifer was one of the faculty members behind the decision. He teaches marketing and quantitative analysis to Darden MBA students and was familiar with Palisade’s DecisionTools® Suite because of his extensive use of @RISK in his teaching and research. When he tested StatTools, he liked its snug fit with Excel, its short learning curve, and its easy, check-box approach to defining a dataset. According to Dr. Pfeifer, “Palisade did a good job of balancing ease of use with flexibility and robust results. I think StatTools will allow our students to perform better statistical models more easily.”

Echoing Dr. Pfeifer was Shawn Harahush, StatTools Product Manager at Palisade: “One of the goals in developing StatTools was to make the software easy to use, thus avoiding the need to learn a complex new package.”

For job placement of its MBA graduates, Darden has been rated #1 in the country by U.S. News and World Report. This means that when the next crop of Darden students take positions at major corporations, those businesses will get the benefit of their strong statistics backgrounds and knowledge of StatTools.

» More about StatTools
» Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia