Every student in Professor Kurpis’s classes have engaged in decision making process such as building the egg protection, searching for a particular poster, deciding how much employees you need to open up a pizza restaurant and etc. Those were all the fun time we all had enjoyed in this semester. Different to the usual entertaining decision making we had encountered in the class, we came to a critical moment for a major decision making on Mar, 9 2009 – the day we had to come up an absolute agreement from the whole class on how to deal with our exams.
Since many students are not satisfied with their first mid term exam, Professor Kurpis agreed to let us make a 100% agreement from the whole class on how do we like to adjust the next exam and what to do with out first exam. In the beginning, it seemed like an easy and exciting task, just to say and do whatever I wanted and Professor Krupis could not reject them. However, the procedure in this decision making turned out to be tough since we are not only dealing with a group with 4 to 5 people, we are dealing with the whole class, estimate about 80 students. At the moment, we were allowed only one hour of discussion on the decision making. Time was very critical to everyone. As the discussion started, everyone started to buzz around with their own opinions. All of the sudden, the class became extremely noisy. No one come up to organize the discuss until about 10 minutes later a guy who sat in the front came up to say stuff like letting someone write down our opinions and then we voted for the best one. This guy played a big role in helping us to get together and focus on our attention.
During the discussion, some people wanted only multiple - choices and some people wanted essay part. It’s hard for us to make an absolute decision since everyone got their own capabilities and voices of opinions. There were a lot of agreements and disagreements. I didn’t join the discussion much because most of my thoughts are already told by the others. Many people raise their hands to disagree when I wanted to. Also, I felt like there was too much voice and many people were just combating and arguing on the same thing over and over. There was a moment of time that people were losing control and getting temper in favor of their decisions. I was a little passive in this decision making procedure because I didn’t feel like to reject others’ decisions in favor of mine. I think all the opinions from the other had their usefulness to help students achieve a best grade. But I did rise up my hand to vote for my favorite decision.
We accomplished our decision just at the moment the class ended. The result turned out to be a satisfactory to all of us since it involved everyone’s opinion in it. It was a fair decision because it didn’t favor one person over the other. Everyone in the class played a major part in it. This practice made me understand more about decision making. As the number of people who can make decisions gets larger, it becomes harder and time consuming to make a best decision because no one wants to be ignored and omitted as a part. Therefore, there will be more opinions and more ideas come up when there are more people. And it becomes harder for us to choose the best one out of many decisions.