Influencing and decision-making

The course title sounds interesting enough, influencing is leadership and decision-making is the quantitative section of the course. For me, the outcomes were not so clear, after 12 weeks, what could I take away from this? There was tons of reading involved and it was pretty drab material, maybe I expected more?

I am a concept person who prefers working with hard models and data, we never really worked our way through multiple  contemporary decision-making models analysing the positives and consequences of each model. In fact, I took on some extra reading because I didn't have enough hard models. I had to work through decision-making chapters from organisational behaviour and contemporary management reference books to get the information I desired.

This helped me immensely, we had to work in virtual teams to develop a decision-making rubric and I provided the bulk of the content from my organsational behaviour textbook to score our group an 88% high distinction. Of the 80+ students in the class, the second highest scoring group was 63% falling a couple of percent short of a credit and third place was 48%, a couple of percent short of a pass - the rest of the class were significantly lower.

The rubric case study made up 50% of the total marks of the course, the second exam for the remaining 50% was a one hour timed test taken online for a combined total. This will no doubt damage some grade point averages and absolutely add to the stress of the timed exam. I could relax to a certain degree knowing I only need to get 6% to pass the unit where as the majority of the class need a good result on the timed exam to get anywhere near passing.

This raises some serious questions regarding the content. If our team had the highest group mark out of the class and I wasn't really sure of the outcomes of the unit after getting bogged down in academic reading - what then? If I didn't have the organisational behaviour and contemporary management chapters of various textbooks, we would no doubt be in the same boat as the rest of the class.

In preparing for the timed exam, do I continue to review my outside organisational behaviour and contemporary management material that brought success to our team in the previous case study rubric? Or do I try a different approach using only their course material and risk bombing the exam?

Regardless of exam success or failure, the reason for undertaking this unit is to learn tangible principles to bring to the workplace to be more efficient and employable, we need to add value to our employment. I'm not sure this unit really met the objectives of what we hoped to achieve.