Decision Making

The class was given an objective: Prof. K would do anything reasonable to favor the class for the first exam as well as formulate the second exam as we wished IF AND ONLY IF we as a class could come to a unanimous decision for both scenarios. From the start, I feel that the class went about the decision making process pretty well. One classmate got up and quickly took charge as the team leader and began to write people's ideas on the board. Given that our class is quite large, I feel we did a fairly good job communicating and when things began to get a little out of hand, the class leader quickly intervened and restored the order. After we went around the room and wrote down people's proposals for the first task, (what to do with the 1st exam) we began to vote and compromise where needed until we reached a unanimous decision. We repeated the same steps for the second task (how to format the 2nd exam), however we were not as successful. The class was not able to reach a unanimous decision based on the proposed ideas from students, but we quickly made a decision on how to handle it. We did not want to lose out on our decision from the first task, so we unanimously decided to allow Prof. K to format the 2nd exam. Keeping what we gained from the first task was more important than deciding on how to format the 2nd exam. I think this was a crucial decision made by the class.

I personally chose the Accommodation approach to handle conflict because I wanted to help in making a decision that would benefit the majority of the class. Since the class test grades were not so good, I knew that the majority of the students would base their decisions on what would either give them extra credit or nullify the exam grade completely. Therefore, I tended to vote for such proposals that would favor the majority. Knowing how the class reacted and how we communicated to one another, I could have also chosen the Collaborating approach to seek results. Bargaining and negotiation within a group is very important and is usually how decisions are made. It is unlikely that all members of a group will agree on the same exact things, therefore some things must be given up to gain others.

In conclusion, I feel that we performed well as a large group with a limited amount of time. We were able to agree on one of the tasks and although we did not succeed on the second task, we were quick to agree that the advantages of the first tasks were far too great to lose out on--hence we decided to give up our say on the 2nd task. The main objective for us was to see what would benefit us for the first 2 exams, but little did we know that we were learning how to make decisions in such a large group. I guess that's why Prof. K gets paid the big bucks.