BREAKDOWN OF CREDIT HOURS
4
3
X
CLASSES
12
=
CREDIT HOURS EACH
CREDIT HOURS
5
MEMBERS PER TEAM
ASSIGNED RANDOMLY
$
CLASSES TAKEN FIN 2400
MIS 2020
FINANCE MANAGEMENT
MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS
MKT 2400
MGT 2100
INTRO TO MARKETING MANAGEMENT
INTRO TO MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATION
PROJECTS SPECS
12 15 TO TO
HOURS PER WEEK
X
5
≈
WEEKS PER PROJECT
GRADE BASED OFF TEAM PERFORMANCE
70
HOURS PER PROJECT PRESENTATION
any problems. However, the moment someone stops pulling his or her fair share, the entire group suffers. “In my group, a person was struggling with getting her lines ready,” Chris says. “We went from 11:30 in the morning until 8:30 at night just reciting her lines to make sure that she had it down and that she wasn’t going to choke when we did the presentation. She did great during the presentation, but if it had just been based on individual performance, I don’t know if I would have actually helped her because I would have been worried about what I was going to do instead of how the team was going to do itself.” But teamwork is not easy when you are spending 1215 hours per week for five weeks with a specific group of people. There are schedules to work around and social life activities in which to partake. “That was one thing I got slashed on in my peer reviews,” Jack says, a collegiate athlete on the cross country team at Ohio University recalling his last group project experience. “This one girl said I had to make school a bigger priority and miss practice two or three times a week in order to meet group meetings.” The quarter-to-semester change contributed to the challenge of setting up group meetings. On quarters, taking the four standard cluster courses would have been a full course load, but not on semesters. Now, cluster students
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backdrop | Spring 2013
40%
REPORT
60%
have to decide if they will add a fifth class to achieve 15 hours or remain at the 12 hours provided by strictly cluster classes. The added obligation to take a fifth class creates scheduling conflicts. And what about the weekend? The current group remembers the different scheduling strategies they experienced from their last projects. “We would meet Friday, Saturday and Sunday,” Chris says. “We would just meet in the middle of the day so we would have the Sunday night to do homework and Saturday night for whatever social activities.” While some groups, like Chris’, utilized their weekends in full, other groups gave themselves some slack. “We never met on Saturdays and our weekends were not structured,” Jade counters. “It was a lot more loose on the weekends.” Regardless of time conflicts and difficulties with class schedules, the work must be done. The group’s grade depends on it. And the cluster’s grading process is not everyone’s favorite. When grading, the four teachers who instruct the cluster are expected to pull together and cooperate as much as the students are. After the students hand in their reports and finish their presentations, the teachers meet and evaluate their projects. Discussions are necessary for the projects, In Oklahoma, you can be arrested for making ugly faces at a dog.
because they are designed not to have a “right” answer. “I mean it kind of makes me mad that they assign us a project that they don’t necessarily know the answer to and they rely on us to provide the answer,” Jeremiah says. The case studies are not always pulled from textbooks. Real companies seek out help from OU’s business school, making a concrete answer for each situation difficult to determine. As a result, professors evaluate the groups’ presentations and research skills used to support their arguments. “We don’t care as much about the specific answer. We care about how they got to it and can make a good reasoned argument for why they chose the answer they did,” Coombs says. Coombs defends the group grading system because it reflects what students will experience in the real world. “The greatest benefit for students is that it challenges them with very realistic business issues, like they are going to see in their careers, where there is no certain answer,” Coombs says.
Students gain realistic business experience through helping established companies and nonprofit organizations. Such businesses seek out OU’s business school for guidance. Coombs explains that companies ask for help from fundraising ideas to large-scale marketing advice. OU’s business school has helped numerous for-profit companies as well as nonprofits, such as the Nelsonville Downtown Association, Habitat for Humanity and the Empower Campaign. Those companies not only seek the opportunity to work with students for business advice, they also see the opportunity as a valuable chance to job scout. “They want to be able to recruit here. They’re seeing this as an opportunity to meet students earlier in their career path, talk to them about internships and eventually fulltime employment,” Coombs says.
THE DREADED SEVEN After five weeks of painstaking research, the cluster dons crisp button-down shirts and sleek jackets to give their presentations that final business-professional touch. The past 70 hours of work are compressed into seven minutes of clean, green and white PowerPoint slides. The students have survived round two of the cluster ordeal and will carry these skills from the classroom to the conference table. After the presentations, the next task on the agenda is to celebrate. “We have one day to forget the past five weeks,” Jack says as the rest of group laughs in agreement. And Court Street anxiously awaits the sound of polished heels and dress shoes on its bricks.
In Salt Lake County, Utah, it’s illegal to walk down the street carrying a violin in a paper bag.
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