22  Assessments

Author

Stijn Masschelein

22.1 Overview

There are two components to the assessment for this unit. You will see that one form of assessment that you might expect is not there, i.e. the mid-semester exam. This unit has only one, final exam. This exam counts for 50% of the final mark. The final exam will consist of approximately six questions about two or three different case studies. You will get the case studies before the exam and you can bring them to the exam together with all written material such as the lecture notes, your notes from the workshops and other annotations you have made when studying for this unit. This means that the exam is an open book exam.

The other components consist of group work and your contribution to the group work. During the workshop, you will work in groups on different case studies. As a group, you will

  1. present a solution to the case study for 20% of your marks
  2. evaluate other students’ presentation for 10% of your marks
  3. write a report on a case study for 20% of your marks.

You can find my expectations for the presentations, discussions and reports in the guidelines below. These three activities mimic the decision process that firms use when tackling a business problem; they start from an initial brainstorm with a tentative proposal, that gets criticised, and improved into a final plan.

The structure of the workshop ensures that you will have ample time to prepare these three activities during the workshop through discussions and presentations in the week before the assessment of the three components. To avoid or at least diminish the risk of free riders in your group, you will have the opportunity to evaluate the contribution of the different members of your group through Feedback Fruits on LMS. Your individual mark for each of the three group assessments will be adjusted by your individual contribution score based on the peer evaluation. If you contributed equal to the average of your group, your marks for the group work will be the same as the group mark; if you contributed more, your mark will be higher than the group mark; if you contributed less, your mark will be lower than the group mark.

In total, there will be 10 workshops. I will assign you into temporary groups for workshop 1 and 2 (week 2 and 3) of 3-5 students. During week 1-3, you will have time to form your own groups on LMS. If you are not enrolled in a group, I will allocate you to a group. The groups will be finalised before workshop 3 (week 4) in order to accommodate late enrolments and unenrolments. I have gone back and forth between letting students choose their own groups and allocating you into groups myself. In my experience, self chosen groups are less prone to conflict but also less diverse in their opinions. I for know settled on letting you choose your own group members because a conflict free group is better for learning than a diverse group. Nevertheless, if you have problems in your group with a group member, you can always contact me and I am happy to mediate if necessary. In general, my experience with group work has been that students who contribute to the group have a high mark and students who do not contribute a lot have a lower mark.

In the first workshop, you will discuss the first case study which you can find on LMS. I expect that you have read the case study when you come to the workshop.

Important

I want to highlight that is really important to keep up with the unit. The lectures are only 45 minutes long. The questions we will answers in the workshops are specificly about the case studies. You need to have read the case study before you come to the workshop to get the full benefit from the workshop.

During the workshop I will start off with presenting two sets of questions about the business case. You can find the questions in the chapter with the case studies. In the first half of the workshop, you will have the time to come up with an answer to one of the two sets of questions. In the second half of the workshop, one group will present their solution for question 1. Another group will get the time to evaluate the answers in the first presentation. Afterwards, I will open the floor for further comments and improvements on the solution. We will follow exactly the same procedure for question 2. This is the general structure of the workshops that I will use for this unit. In the second workshop, two groups that have not presented or evaluated will have to present or evaluate the second case in the same format. There will be no assessment in the first and the second workshop. These workshops will help you to get used to the format and the expectations I set for participation in the unit.

22.2 Guidelines

22.2.1 Group Solution

The most important part for every assessment item is to give good answers, good solutions to the questions. This section applies to all three assessment items.

  1. Try to be as complete as possible. Think about the case from different angles. Think about the cost side, strategic considerations, the influence of competitors, sellers and customers, and the other, general economic circumstances. Think about transaction costs and think about specific and general knowledge.

  2. Be precise and specific. Clarify your solution with specific examples from the case. Use the numbers, tables and examples that are given in the case to illustrate a broader point.

  3. Present your solution consistently. Make sure that your answers to different questions do not conflict with each other. If you identify the complexity of a system as a problem, maybe because it confuses decision makers, your solution cannot be to make the system even more complex. In that case, the solution is to simplify the system or explain the system better.

  4. If multiple solutions are possible and you can not choose, present them both. It is no weakness to acknowledge that you do not have all the information to take a definitive decision. You do have to make it clear if the multiple solutions can be used together or not to have a consistent solution.

22.2.2 Presentation

  1. The presentation should be no longer than 20 minutes per group. Aim for 15 minutes.

  2. Send your slides via email to me and the group who has to do the evaluation on the deadline date that is given in the Excel File Calendar on LMS. You will be able to find the emails of the group you need to send the slides to on LMS as well.

  3. Slides are not a summary of your talk. Use your slides (1) to give your audience a feel of the general structure of your talk and (2) to visualise what you are saying. Do not have long blocks of text that you just read. Limit the number of lines of text on your slides. A good rule of thumb is to not use more than 7 lines of text per slide.

  4. Limit the number of slides in your presentations. 1 slide per minute of talking is a good rule of thumb. Less is more.

  5. Try to use visual elements. Summary tables can be handy to give a general overview but they quickly become difficult to read. You can use graphs to visualise the costs of different products or different costs of one product. Flowcharts are a good way of visualising a process. Double arrows can represent a trade-off.

  6. Look at and talk to your audience. Try to make eye contact with your audience. You are explaining the case study and your solution to the audience. You are not reading a report. Talk in a speaking language not in writing language. How we form sentences and the words we use is different in writing than when we speak. For instance, we normally use shorter sentences when we speak. Keep in mind that a presentation is speaking not writing.

  7. Try to tell a story with an introduction, a middle and an ending. Do not give a mere summary of facts. Think about what knowledge your audience needs to follow your story. The introduction should contain the background information on the organisation that is necessary to understand your answers to the questions but not more than that.

22.2.3 Evaluation

  1. You have 10 to 15 minutes to evaluate the other group’s solution. Not their presentation style! The discussion will mainly be with me but you can ask clarifying questions of the other group when their solution or presentation is not clear. If it is not clear how they calculated some costs or what their underlying assumptions are, you can ask them.

  2. You can offer other options that were not mentioned by the group. Maybe, you looked at the case from a different angle. I strongly encourage this and it will give you a higher mark than just asking questions.

  3. You can offer your alternatives to the solution and discuss it with the other group. If you have different solutions it is important to identify why you have differences. If you do not agree with some aspects of the solution presented by the other group. Explain why they might be wrong or why you believe you end up with a different solution.

  4. You can prepare some slides for the evaluation but it is no requirement. Slides can come in handy if you want to discuss some tables.

22.2.4 Report

  1. You have to work on Cadmus and submit your report via Cadmus. The main reason is that I want to have some assurances that you wrote the report as a group and it was not just copied in from a Generative AI website.

  2. You only need to answer the questions in the report. You do not need to discuss the other group’s presentation. You do not have to write up their solution but you should use the best parts of their solution and improve upon it. If you disagree with their solution to the

  3. Write up the best solution(s) to the question in 2-4 pages. You can add more pages in Appendices with tables and illustrations as background information. You should use one or two summary tables/illustrations/graphs in the main text of 2-4 pages. Further background tables should go in an appendix. The tables, illustrations, graphs, and appendices do not count towards the 2-4 pages guidelines.

  4. Use full sentences and paragraphs. Try to avoid enumerations. Do not follow the style of this section.