“Advocating for a Common Ground”
Last Wednesday (03/04), we had our first exam. Upon receiving the results on Monday (03/09), many students weren’t happy with their grade. After getting feedback from us, Professor Kurpis decides to give us a “decision making” activity. He proposed we come up with suggestions on how we can make the next exam easier for us as well as how we can rectify the first exam. The catch was we all had to decide unanimously on these suggestions. If one of us objects, then the deal is off. Last but not least our suggestions were subject to his approval as well. We had approximately 30 minutes to complete this task. So how did we handle this conflict?
“Conflict Management vs. Conflict Resolution”
Looking in from the outside, one might think this is an easy exercise. It was quite the contrary, well at least for some. First, I think it’s fair that I give my opinion of the first exam. As stated in class, I thought the exam was fair, I don’t think professor Kurpis tested us on anything that we haven’t covered in class. He also gave us a list of all the possible topics that could appear on the exam beforehand, so he wasn’t sneaky in any way regarding the material covered. However, I do think the exam covered a lot, as of Tuesday, March 5th we had gone through 12 chapters and a couple of additional slides. Granted he did not include a few chapters, but the additional slides made up for the missing chapters. I also thought the “multiple multiple choice” questions were just tricky. We are “conditioned” in most classes to think that a question only has one right answer, so trying to depict more than one answers for a question is a difficult task to do especially under time constraints. I also feel like these kinds of questions are more opinionated than straight forward. In the sense that, say one of the questions were, define culture. Now, if we only had one right answer to choose from, I would just choose the one that we spoke about in class. But we have to choose more than one answer, the way I see culture and what it is and what culture consists of, might not be the same for others. Therefore, we will all choose different answers based on what we think culture is, or base on our own culture, past experience etc. I also think if professor Kurpis cut down on the number of topics that we need to know and focus more on the “core competency” of the exam that will help a lot of us. In no way am I suggesting for him to tell us exactly what’s going to be on the exam, but almost half the material he told us to study was not present on the exam. Time is not working for most all of us, I think it fare to say most of us that go to school in the evening have jobs, a lot of us have full time jobs, kids, family and all sorts of things that require our time. So to help us manage our time effectively, I really do think it would be great to narrow the list of topics that’s going to be covered. Overall, the exam was challenging (as it should be, I mean, we’re in college here), but given the “multiple multiple choice” questions, and the long list of topics to be covered just made it really hard for a lot of us.
The reason why this activity is considered to be a conflict in my opinion is each one of us had slightly different problems with the exam. Therefore, this is where coming together to form a unanimous decision was a dilemma.
“Breakdowns to Breakthroughs”
According to Professor Kurpis, there are 5 different ways people attempt to handle conflict when working as a team. The first is “compete to win” this is where one is just concerned about his or her own self interest. I don’t think I took this role at all. If I remember correctly, my first option was to drop the lowest grade. I purposely chose that because I know a lot of students would like that idea. I did notice there were a few people who were going back and forth on whether or not to have essays. Some hated essays and some didn’t mind.
Another path some took was avoidance (withdrawal, used when there’s “no chance of winning”). Usually I’m not one to talk a lot in class, not because I don’t know the answer, but because I think it’s very important to be an “active listener” both as student and at work. Often times I think we get too carried away with what we are staying and loose sight. It becomes a thing were, we have to constantly “shout out” what we think and we’re not taking anyone or anything into consideration. But I was not going to sit this one out; this is where it’s important to voice your opinion. When a decision is being made right in front of your eyes that affect you in the future, you have to participate. It’s your obligation to yourself to have an input. Which is why I don’t understand why a lot people didn’t participate; yesterday in class, some said that the reason why they didn’t participate is because they were annoyed all “yelling” and “confusion” of coming up with a cohesive solution. I’m sorry but that doesn’t cut it for me, first, I don’t get why anyone was annoyed, this was a group activity with about 50-60 students, with everyone throwing ideas out, did you really expect a quiet room? Did you expect for someone to just know the “magical answers” that’s going to work for all of us? No, this is why we were loud and it was chaotic. If this kind of stuff annoys to the point where you don’t want to be there, then how will survived in the business world where at all most all jobs you are practically forced to work as a team or with groups of people.
I believe the class did a lot of compromising (used with decision making under pressure; all members are equal) For example, some did not want true or false questions on the next test where as some really like those kinds of question. We settled on 5 true or false questions instead of 10. Some didn’t want essays or short answers. We compromise to have essays in the form of short answers. Truthfully, I don’t mind writing an essay or short answers, so I didn’t care about that. I would have agreed to anything the class came up with regarding writing essays and short answers as well as true or false questions. I guess it’s accurate to say by allowing the class to decide what best works for them I took part in the accommodation way of dealing with conflicts. That is, I saw those issues as more important to my classmates than myself.
Finally, I believe what made our choices great is that we collaborate (required bargaining and negotiation among group). We were all in it together. We had two leaders that muddled through. Gabriel did great with getting the ideas on the board; Teddy did a great job getting everyone to focus primarily on what was most important to us, as a team, (Kudos to Teddy & Gabriel). Then we all voted on which option will work best for us. We came with, 5 true and false questions, straight forward multiple choice (where there’s only one answer), and short answers instead of essays, as well as a more condense in-class review. In the end the main reason why this was such a great group activity is because we all got a little of what we wanted, and no one had objected, even though Professor Kurpis somewhat “coached and encouraged” anyone who had any objections to speak up.
