I never thaught that we would be in a situation that we had to decide about our own grading policy and exam format. The activity was a great exercise on decission making. Under the pressure of time with eighty students we had to come at a conclusion with 100% agreement in making two decission. The curve to be implemented for the first midterm and format of the exam and this was a utilitarian concept of making decission that would benefit the entire class. Almost everybody spoke on their best interest. Some classmates that had better score raised their voice to drop the lowest grade of the two midterm where as students who did not perform at their first midterm were much worried because there was no gurantee that we could do better in the next exam. However, i was very much convienced with the curve rather than any other options but would accomodate with any feasible decission. There were several conflicts among different groups of students. eventually every one came to an agreement beside Joey. He sticked very much to his ethics. Ethically, he believed that this subject was not hard and would not like any curve or any other options proposed by the students and it was not fare to the professor. He basically believed that he was responsibile for not performing well and sticked to his view of not changing his grade. Finally one of the class mate suggested that, Let Joey keep his grade and every one would go with the curve and drop the lowest grade. Joey agreed to that. Then we were about to discuss about the format, Mike stepped up and convenced Joey that he would benefit either way. Why not to go along with the class. Suddenly Joey compromised with the class decission and said this is utilitarian view. But, Mike responded brother we can go even with out you, it is for your own benefit. Thus every one agreed to move on to the format of the exam with 100% agreement to drop the lowest grade and the curve.
Deciding the format of the exam was the next biggest issue that the class had to agree upon. Personally as far as i was concerned, i liked the format but would be more happy if he added some extra credit question and some options to chose fromt he question. This would give me more room for me to boost my points in the next exam. I liked th emultiple multiple question because, i am not good at multiple question. From the multiple multiple question, i can accumulate more points than multiple question and that makes sence. And, the entire class agreed upont the same format with some extra credit question and one choice for essay question. The entire class was on 100% agreement along with the professor to work accordingly.
As far as i was concerned, i was very happy with the decission. It favored me. I was also ready to compromise along with the class because we cannot please every one when making a decission. Someone has to compromise, and some will be ignored One reason that made me keep quite because my grade was on the mean. If i would had to make decission, I would welcome all ideas and narrow down the decission proccess timely based upon the benefit of the class. I would stick to the utilitarian view and would have decided.
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3 comments:
I'm glad you are happy with the final decision, as I shared the same feeling towards our proposal. If it benefitted you and I, I'm sure it benefitted everyone else as well. That's why I think it's very important to voice your opinions b/c if it helps you, most likely it would help someone else. It serves the purpose of enlightening the class with new ideas. However, I do think that it would be nice to have a limit to one's influence-meaning one person just dominate when his/her ideas are obviously not agreed upon by many. Fortunately, we didnt have that problem in our class. I see that you bolded Joey throughout your blog, I hope there are no hard feelings from last week's decision making process... Even though some people's concept completely contradicted mine, I really looked foward to hearing from everyone one of these contrasting ideas. Being part of different organizations, i realized that I learn A LOTT from people who think completely differently from me. They give me new insights, and allow me to be aware... It's great! I would of never thought that in any class, there would be people who OPPOSE of getting a curve/ grade dropped! This situation was definetly an eye opener. I hope we all learned from this discussion. In the long run, learning how to WORK WITH OTHER PEOPLE with differently personalities and views, is more important than the short term grade increase, (Dont get me wrong, I'm soo glad the professor allowed us this proposal)
Honestly at first i wasn't too happy that Joey disagreed to our proposal when the whole class had approved it. Im sure that I wasn't the only one to feel that way. At first i thought he was being selfish because he was setting the whole class back. I mean we barely had time left and we needed 100% approval in order for our proposal to pass. But then i came to find out that he didn't quite understand what we were saying and was reluctant to say so because many made him uncomfortable to speak out. I think that it is important to listen to other people's ideas and also create a comfortable environment where they'll feel free to throw in some ideas.
Nah, there is no hard feeling. We love each other. This is a good observation. We are all hardworking and smart student, so we will do better next time.
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