The Decision of Our Semester

Monday's class was one of the more interesting and extraordinary experiences of my two years in Baruch. As a class we were given the authority to decide on the professor would handle our grades from the first test. What made this decision so difficult, was the fact that as a class of 60 students we had to make a unanimous decision. So the student who got the highest mark and the student that got the lowest mark had to agree on what the professor should do with this test. There are various decision making techniques that we could have used to make an unanimous decision.

Chaos was certainly an issue as the decision making process began in the class. Once someone took charge and began asking everyone of their opinions, there was order in the class. Personally, I believe without the pressure of having to make a unanimous decision affected everyones ability to make a decision. Many of the students gave up the best possible method to improve their grade in order to have one method that would help the entire class at the same time. This can be considered the compromise method and it worked very well to make a unanimous decision for the entire class.

The accommodation method is another method that could have easily worked well with our situation. The class saw everyones needs and made a decision in which other's needs were more important then their own needs. This can be very similar to the compromise method and I believe both would help if we were to make a future unanimous decision as a class.

Planning

Planning is something we all have to take into account before taking part in any activity. Planning a has many steps to it, and through the egg drop activity, I think our group did go through some of the steps of planning but missed out on some crucial steps that led to our egg breaking on the drop. The first two steps of setting goals and determining our status we did go through. From the outset we knew our timing of planning, that we had 20 minutes to finish all planning and be ready to receive the materials. We also asked if anyone had any experience in engineering and/or architecture because we believed that would significantly help our group construct something that would protect the egg. We came up with an initial design and with the remaining time we developed a few alternative designs. We then had to make the decision as a group to which design we were going to use. The fourth step I believe was our mistake and the reason for our failure in the task. As a group we did not delegate to what action each group member was to perform when receiving the materials. One we got the materials everyone was trying to do everything and therefore our structure did not come as we designed in the planning period. All steps must be met in order to successfully put your plan into action and success.