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Friday, September 10, 2004

Whining about university

Like the title says:

The ‘Business Ethics’-professor is extremely boring, but that’s okay because I’m used to boring professors by now. I’ve had three years of experience after all. What’s not okay is him deciding to make us do two exams, a mid-term examination and a final examination (both will take 3 hours, so that’s a double exam). The mid-term examination will take place during a normal school week, on a Monday from 17.00 till 20.00. Monday, the one day in the week I have to get up at 06.00 in the morning and I have lectures and am busy from 08.45 till 16.30. Does anyone think I still have a fair chance of doing 10 difficult open questions at the exam with a satisfactory result after such a day? My head is probably going to explode during the exam...

The professor of the Growth-seminar has come up with this crazy experiment. He has never done anything like this before so he has no idea whether it’ll work. (Just great! Our grade depends on it, but absolutely nothing to worry about...) Let me try to explain what his brilliant idea is about.

We’re going to write a scientific report with the entire class. The report will consist of four chapters. There are 28 people in our class; 7 of them will be managers, 14 will be analysts and 7 will be statisticians. There are 7 groups of 4 people. Every group consists of one manager, two analysts and one statistician. Students will switch between manager, analyst and statistician every chapter. (For example: on the first chapter I’ll be a manger, on the second an analyst, on the third a statistician and on the fourth an analyst again) Because we only have 8 weeks to write the report we’ll have to do 2 chapters at the same time. So everyone has two roles at the same time. (For example: manager of chapter one and analyst of chapter 2 at the same time)

The idea is that the 7 managers of one chapter get together and divide the chapter into 7 sections. Every manager will then divide his/her own section into two subsections. These subsections will be written by the two analysts. They have to do all the research, reading and writing. The statistician will have to find some interesting data for the two analysts. When the analysts have finished their subsections the manager will have to check them and complete his/her section. Together with the sections of the other managers the chapter will be formed. And this will be done four times, until we have four chapters.

Because we have 4 international students in our class that don’t speak any Dutch the entire report will have to be in English. That’s not such a big deal for me, but most of my fellow students aren’t very good in English. Especially now that we are going to write a scientific paper. So the manager is going to have his hands full with improving the English of the analysts.

Are you still with me? Truly ingenious idea right? Right????

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