When thinking of how I make decisions, the first thing that comes to mind is my decision to go to Baruch College. I wouldn't say it was an easy decision, but Baruch was the choice that suited my best interests: it was a good business school and affordable. Now putting myself in a group setting, as I was in in my Management class, making a decision becomes more difficult because everyone in the group has their own goals that they want to get out of from the decision.
After receiving our first exam grades back for this class, our professor told us that we had the choice of deciding unanimously if we wanted to have a curve and extra credit to increase our grades that were slightley low, at least for my taste. Also, we were able to decide on changing the exam's format, which, currently, was true/false, multiple multiple choice (this mean there can me more than once choice that is correct), short answers, and an essay. I was excited to have the power to better my grades and my future grades.
My agenda for this decision making exercise was to have a curve, have the chance to get extra credit, and get rid of the multiple multiple choice and the essay parts of the exam. Unfortunately, at least for me, I decided not to fight tooth and nail for the extinction of those parts of the exam. We had a time limit; we had to decide unanimously; some people wanted essays, while others wanted multiple multiple choice; therefore I decided to hear them out. Everyone's strengths are different, and although my strengths aren't writing and multiple multiple choice questions, I could live with those parts because the real problem I felt was that there was a lot to study from (which I know we can't change the curriculum). Using technical terms, I used the Accommodation method during the decision making exercise. I didn't fight for my agenda and let others decide for me on this problem because I thought others needed to keep the format the same.
Also, there were some compromises of the multiple multiple choice and essay parts, which made it easier to accept the minor changes that made those parts a little less threatening to take on during a test. For the multiple choice questions, the professor had to identify which questions had more than one answer. For the essay, one student didn't want the essay at all, which you can say acted in a Compete to Win way, but the student believed the majority of the class already decided not to have an essay in the exam, which I saw was true as well. But in the chaos, people were trying to compromise because some people wanted an essay. What can you do when people are persistent and some may say persuasive? In the end, we compromised, after hearing the arguments from both sides and down to the last minute, to say if we were to have an essay, giving the decision to be made by the professor, we would have more than one topic to choose from in picking our essay choice.
I think the better way, for me, to handle this decision making conflict would have been through collaboration. There are a lot of people in the class, and with more people, it can mean more different agendas. I think if we had more time, we could have split into groups, get a better account of everyone's agenda and prevent people withdrawing from the decision making process. Also, we could have had different ways to approach the grading system that could've benefited everyone. Overall, there would be less conflict because everyone would have been heard.
Decisions, Decisions...You can't win them all.
