Decision Making

   Almost two weeks ago we took our first exam in our MGT class. To the classes surprise, half of all the students failed and the highest grade was an 86!! Obviously this wasn’t a good thing. Thankfully I didn’t fail but I didn’t do so good either. Little did we know Prof. K was going to give us all a chance to bring our grades up. During the last thirty minutes of class the entire class had a chance to come up with a way to raise each persons grade. Whether it be through a curve, extra credit, etc. The only catch was that everyone in the class had to agree. Among the chaos we eventually made our decision but not everything went so smooth. As you can imagine, forty students trying to agree on one thing was not easy. Some students wanted to do whatever it took to boost their grade. Others just wanted to make everyone realized that instead of focusing on this test we should focus on how we should study for the next exam. A lot of the students in the class did participate but there were some who sat back and let everyone else decide.
   Personally, I don’t think I used one specific way to handle the chaos in the classroom. I was kind of quiet to begin with because I wanted to here everyone out. I had no problem agreeing with everyone else’s decision about how to raise our grades. I guess you can say I used accommodation to handle the beginning of our task. However, I didn’t act this way because I though the issue wasn’t important to me but because I agreed with what everyone else was saying.
   After this decision had been made we had a chance to decide what our next exam would look like. At this point everyone was arguing about which sections of the test we should eliminate. I voted to eliminate the “multiple multiple” choice section, until one of the students explained how that wouldn’t benefit us. During this part of our task I tried to voice my opinion of making the essay extra credit by raising my hand, like one of my classmates previously stated we should do….but at this point everyone was rushing to decide because we had about five minutes left. I know the guy next to me agreed with me and we both tried to get everyone to listen but no one did. In the end we were successful though. I don’t know if the guy in front had heard us but an extra credit essay was made an option and everyone agreed. Maybe if we were a little louder someone would have paid attention to what we were saying =)
   During this whole process I was noticing how some of my other classmates were acting. I noticed that some of the students on the left were forming their own group. I remember two students in particular that acted in a “compete to win” behavior. They were the loudest in the whole class and voiced their opinions (which was perfectly fine). The two guys who stood in front of the room (I believe Abe and Julian) were the mediators. Their behavior was an example of trying to come to a compromise. Other students were quiet, they either displayed avoidance or accommodation.
   Overall, I think if our class would have worked together a little more and took into consideration EVERYONE’s thoughts maybe we would have reached our decision faster. If one person would have explained all the options clearer the first time than we wouldn’t have wasted so much time trying to explain it a million times. I don’t think I would change the way I acted during the decision making process because I’m not the best persuasive person. In the end I do think our decisions were the best ones.

An Eggs-cellent Way to Plan

     Last week I had one of the most memorable classes ever! =) In my Management 3120 class we all took part in an activity that my professor named “An eggs-cellent way to plan”. I had no idea what we were about to do. Well, it turns out we (as groups) had to compete against each other to make an egg contraption. One that would protect our egg after we dropped it from 6+ feet. Sound familiar? It might. I remember watching shows about this a while back. We had 25 minutes to plan and design the contraption. Then we had 10 minutes to actually make it. The class turned into chaos because whichever group succeeded would earn 10 bonus points on our first exam. Unfortunately not one group succeeded!! =/

     The whole point of this activity was to see how well we worked as a team to plan out what we were going to do to successfully drop our egg without breaking it. While we were in the planning process we did work well together and everybody had a little input but when I think back to the 25 minutes we had we definitely could have planned better. First of all we never picked a team leader. Which I think was ok because we didn’t have a lot of time. We didn’t set objectives like the Planning Process says to do but again we had a limited amount of time and we were trying to figure out how we were going to earn these extra 10 points. One thing that we did do was ask each other about what abilities and knowledge we had. Not a lot of us had enough knowledge of architecture or drawing to know that we would be 100% successful. I ended up sketching the design and we all agreed on a plan and an alternative.

     All in all I do think my group could have done much better if we had assigned ourselves specific roles before the 25 minutes were up. I think our main problem was time. We were all just trying to get the contraption done before the 10 minutes were up and if we would have assigned ourselves roles than things would have been done more efficiently. I wish we could’ve had a second chance at this activity with a little more time and maybe one of the groups would have actually succeeded.