Issues of negotiation
But the very difficult part for me was to believe that professor seriously was willing to give up his power over construction of the next midterm in “greedy” for good grades students’ hands!!!!!! I’ve never experienced anything like this before and I merely couldn’t believe in everything that was happening around me, sounds silly but it’s true.
Analyzing my behavior afterword I concluded that it was closer to Accommodation then to anything else because my grade was not that bad compare to the average. I practically didn’t participate in discussion about the structure and content of the next midterm cause I think that not the test’s itself was a problem but that I didn’t put enough effort into study.
As an alternative I think we could have a representative from a few group that could be formed on basis of nearby location and those groups would be representing 5 of their strongest ideas. I my opinion it could have eliminated some of the chaotic movement that took place during the class. But in general I believe that the people who were mostly unsatisfied with their grades have taken more action than the ones who got relatively better grades and took more conservative side.
I totally agree with you when you said that you were shocked how the class tried to work together as a whole. People such as yourself sat back and accomodated those who needed the extra points. It was good to see that there are people in the class that care about the others around them.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with the idea of having a few group leaders. I actually said the same thing on my blog post. There would be a lot more order that way and ideas would be passed along clearly.
Any confusion might have been easily diverted if we had time to create a proper negotiation. Sadly, time was something we could not control. Like you said, CHAOS was the first thing that erupted when such strange powers fell in to the hands of the student. But students do not think alike and even with a representative government, all of our points would not be reached. The top 5 is good, but who's to say most of us only want 5 changes.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you. If the class had a better organization and structure the decision making process would had been a smoother one and achieved greater results.
ReplyDeleteI also found myself accommodating after seeing the chaotic environment in class. Certainly, those who needed more were the ones more stressed out.
It's virtually impossible to achieve anything without structure and organization. This is the soul of management and why we are taking this course.
I agree with you. I do think that the class did an awesome job considering we did not have a more structured decision making process. I think that it is true that there was an act of desperation on the part of the students who did worse on the test than the one's that fared better on the test. I think that these people made the unstructured decision process more chaotic.
ReplyDeleteI think that choosing representatives would have helped to make the discussion a lot less chaotic and more productive. The biggest problem with our class discussion was the lack of order. With 70+ people in a classroom, many of whom have different perspectives and ideas, it's hard to give everyone their fair share of attention. If we had elected representatives, I think we would have been able to discuss more ideas and come to agreement more effectively.
ReplyDeleteChaos is probably the right word to describe what we saw. Definitely this is one of the few classes i will never forget
ReplyDeleteIt`s true what you said about chaos in class while everybody strived to get the best possible solution to improve their grades. I felt comfortable with Accommodation method. Even though I did not get a decent grade I knew that I just needed to study harder for the midterm so that I could get a good grade with any format of an exam.
ReplyDeleteAs I already mentioned in my other comment, i think the most chaos was coming because such big amount of students got low grades. (By the way I was one of them). So students tried to do everything, including trying to make their voice heard by everyone in the class, to get a better deal. I did not do it. I chose to compromise, so everyone - students with good and bad grades, would be agree on decision,because i knew that it was only my fault of getting such bad grade. I decided to study for my FINANCE midterm (which I had at the same day) more, thinking that memorizing formulas and concepts is more difficult than studying for MGT exam. I was wrong..
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. I was also using Accommodation method because I got a high grade so I didnt have to participate in this chaos. Only those who needed a much higher grade, had to fight for it.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that if we had some sort of structure or used a better organized method, we would have finish earlier and possibly avoided this chaos.