Decision Making

       Last week, the professor gave us an opportunity to act as a decision maker based on the first exam that we took. There were many students who didn't do well on the exam and our job was to decide what to do in order to have everyone on the track. Once the problem was on the table, the professor stepped back and it was our job to decide what to do. At the beginning, most of us were thinking about curving the grade. As we went along the discussion, we identified many options that made the decision making more easier to handle. In addition, two student were acting as a mediator to make it more organized than it was at the beginning. I voted for the 10 points extra credit with the curve and drop the lowest grade and finally we agreed on that proposal. The format of the exam was good, but the only thing that I didn't like was the multiple multiple choices questions because my ideology is to have full point or nothing. In that case, I acted as a collaborator with other student to replace multiple multiple by just multiple choices until I realized that multiple multiple choices have more advantages based on mathematical reasoning. At the end, I supported for keeping the same format because any change might be catastrophic for certain students. Some students were competing to win and others were just accepting any proposal that came out. The decision making took us more time than it should be because we didn't know how far we could go and there were disagreement between students until five minutes before the end of the class. I think based on all proposals that we agreed on, it is enough to have a good grade in this class and it is up to us to make it right. There was an important argument that one student brought out which was to learn from our mistakes and find out how to do well in the next exam for those students who failed. I think that was an important question that we should spend little bit of time because it might help us in the future. But, the problem of having agreement took us more time that we couldn't take into consideration anything other that reaching the highest level of grade. This activity was not only good for our grade, but a good way to learn how to handle decision making in a difficult situation with time limited.

We did everything, but we failed!

    After the Professor explained the activity that we have to do, we started following the different steps in the planning process. First we defined our goal and objectives for the innovation. We spent few minutes thinking about how we were going to use 8 straws with little bit of tape to protect an egg without breaking when dropped . Our major concern was to build the contraption with the margin of  having at least 50% of the egg's face outside. We came up with ideas, but the best one was to leave a little bit of space between the egg and the straws while we have the tape connecting them. We were monitoring our time between processes to be sure that we don't fall behind. As far as we went in the creation process, we checked the status of our progress and compare to our objectives. 
     Unfortunately, we didn't determine any alternative strategy because we were 100% optimistic that we were going to succeed at once. We had seen ourselves having only strengths in our building process. In the next step, we started analyzing and making tactical plan. We assigned to everyone a task to save time when we have all the necessaries materials to do the creation. 
       When we got the materials, each member started doing his work in order to finish the job on time. It was very easy to put words into action because we had already determined how the process is going to be. At the end of the creation, we checked the result and found out that we didn't leave enough space for the egg that was protected by the straws and we were unable to find alternative way because we were running out of time.  
     We followed all the steps, but almost skipped step number 3 and that could be the reason of our failure. In addition, the team did a great performance in the work process and it was more effective due to the participation of each member. I was really amazing and I think we know now how to make a plan for that kind of activity.