Decision Making

After we had received our grades from our first exam our professor had allowed us to decide amongst ourselves what we had wanted to do with the scores of the first exam.  We were also given the opportunity to make suggestions on how we wanted the next exam to be designed.  He gave us the power to make a proposal that the class would 100 percent agree on which he will grant if everything goes as planned.  If one person disagreed the proposal would be thrown out and we would be stuck with our old grades. We were given roughly around a half hour to get this completed.  Our final proposal consisted of receiving a curve, extra credit worth up to 10 points, and dropping the lowest test among the first two.  The test format would remain the same, however the essay would be marked as extra credit instead. 

Power rested in the hands of the students as it was up to us to come up with the proposal.  A couple of students had taken roles of leaders standing up in front of classroom picking on people to voice their ideas.  This created some sort of control in the room as opposed to people screaming left and right.  The time constraint definitely created more stress in the room.  Things overall were going smoothly a far as ideas were being thrown out.  There wasn’t much disagreeing although there was a lot of clarification that needed to be done.  People didn’t fully understand the ideas that were being proposed.  Personally I felt I did not say much openly in front of class. I didn’t feel the need to speak up since I felt everything I had to say was already being said, since majority of the people were speaking were the people that needed to get a better grade on the test, and I felt I was in that category as well.  However, I was speaking more amongst the classmates around me and did propose to class about combing all three ideas for the grade of exam.  There were people competing to win, those who strongly were fighting to get rid of the essay.  Overall I felt the decision making process in our class wasn’t that bad.  With the leaders in front of the class keeping things in control and having the final say in things made thins less chaotic and more organized.

An Eggs-cellent Way to Plan

The activity we had on planning in class was a very useful one, as it taught us a lot about the planning process.  It was a good way to get us engaged in a hands-on activity to go through the steps involved in getting an objective completed.  The 5 steps of the planning process include defining your objectives and goals, determining the current status and comparing to objectives, developing premises and several alternative strategies, analyzing alternatives and making a tactical plan, and finally implementing the plan and evaluating results. 

We were given eight straws and two feet of tape.  Our goal was to build a contraption for the egg so that when dropped 10 feet off the ground it would survive a crash with no cracks.   At least 50 percent of the egg shell had to be shown at all times.  We had 15 minutes to discuss our plan and 10 minutes to build the contraption.  I felt our group clearly defined the objectives and goals.  We had to come up with a name for the egg, come up with a sketch of our contraption, assign a leader, and distribute tasks equally.  Although we knew what needed to be done, we did not do everything we had to in the planning process.  We did not have a distinct leader in the group.  Everyone kind of just voiced their input and ideas as part of the discussion.   We did not have an alternate back up plan in case the first one did not work when executing it.  There was not enough time to think of multiple ideas.  So as we brought up an idea we just added on to that thought and grew from there.  When it came time for us to execute the contraption it was not clearly defined the tasks to be carried out by each individual.  It seemed as if whoever grabbed their hands on whatever materials first decided to work with that.  At times I felt I had nothing to do.  The blueprint we had of our model was not exactly the same as we had built as an end product.  We had to change up our plan last minute due to the lack of time.  Overall I felt we did get done what we had to do, but with more organization which would have helped with a defined leader, and clearly defined tasks for each person, we could have been more time efficient leading to a possible success.  However, our egg did suffer a crack!