Business Analytics Competition

• Teams must consist of 2 - 4 undergraduate students currently enrolled in a program at the accredited higher education institution they will represent.
• Each team must include a faculty advisor from their home institution. Student teams must register for the competition under the name of their faculty advisor.
• Students and their faculty advisor must attend the conference to compete.

BAC@MC features a two-phase competition, both of which require student teams to analyze and glean business insight from a competition-specific dataset.

Phase One:

• Data and questions for the first phase of the competition are made available to registered teams in February.
• Student teams work at their home institutions to analyze the supplied dataset to develop solutions to the phase-one questions.
• Each team prepares and submits a poster summarizing their analysis and answers to the questions.
• Team members present the posters at the conference poster session and are assessed by a panel of judges.

Phase Two:

• Teams are provided with additional questions and data on the same or similar theme.
• Student teams have approximately 20 hours to prepare and present their solutions to the judging panel on the second day of the conference.

Faculty advisors attending the conference will constitute the set of phase-one judges. Phase-one scores will be based on the ratings given by faculty advisors (advisors will not be asked to evaluate their own team).

Phase two will be evaluated by a panel of practitioners representing various industries who value business analytics. A team’s overall score will be determined by a combination of their phase-one and phase-two scores.

The top three teams will be recognized during the award ceremony and will receive monetary awards:

• First Place: $5,000
• Second Place: $2,500
• Third Place: $1,000

There will also be awards for the three best posters.