Any day that is superceded by a 311 exam should be marked down on the school website as a major milestone. When dejected students take their leave from the examinations hall, they should be be presented with door gifts for successfully completing this course (of course, provided we don’t fail). Then, together, the culprits should make an online video and post it on the course blackboard to apologise to all of us for putting up these 13 weeks of damn.
My hatred for the course runs deep.
I remembered few months ago, when deciding what course to take, I looked at the course descriptions and thought that this is a subject that I can nail. Strategy. Wow. Sounds cool. Sounds like my kind of thing. It’s like waiting for a gift, except that 14 weeks later, the gift finally arrived, but wrapped and drenched in a muddle of shit.
The first shit
This involves something known as CESIM. I think in addition to the famous 4-letter word, some urban dictionary should include CESIM into their arsenal of profanities. You know, something like “Don’t CESIM me! You annoying shit.” or “This is officially disgusting. It’s so CESIM.” In a wildly misguided interpretation, CESIM has been regarded as a ‘game’. If it’s a game, getting your butt stucked in a dirty toilet bowl with your pants down while getting caught on national TV is also a game.
Here’s what is stated on the license. CESIM: Practice Makes Profit. “Have fun and gain business-decision making experience with online business simulation…..compete with your classmates on the simulated markets.” Ok, the only profit I made is the $30 bucks of loss used to purchase this license, and the only fun I derived is in imagining how fun it would be to shred the $30 bucks into pieces instead.
Ultimately, CESIM is not dependent on how well you do but how badly others suck. See, my team started off with the grand idea of developing a strategy and how we are going to make use of it to guide our decision making process. 1 or 2 rounds later, we decided that all we can committ is 2 hours. Soon, it became 1 hour, which is slowly manifested into “Can we don’t meet?”. The final round we spend 20 minutes to get it done with and our final results showed we are fourth. Obviously, we are not better than the 3 other teams. It merely means the 3 other teams suck more than us.
And then there is a presentation which is basically 90% lying, 10% pray-your-lies-won’t-be-exposed. Requirement is to evaluate your performance and to provide feedbacks about the game in general. Our team lied by saying that we did well considering the competitive nature of our market, and of course, we said that the game is fantastic in helping us learn business skills. I am sure this is an evil that has manifested over the years ever since the horrible idea of “using CESIM as a teaching tool” was brought onto the table. I pray for the future students.
What’s more shocking is that there are people who actually liked this game!
The second shit
This involves a gimmick known as a ‘case exam’. So basically it involves allowing us to have the case first, but not the questions. It’s like giving a kid a candy wrapper, and tell him that he can’t have the candy until Christmas. Of course that kid will hold on to the wrapper like some kind of prized possession, licking off any candy presence it may have.
It’s 16 pages of case. 16 FREAKING PAGES!!!!
And what is so marvellous is that everyone analysed the case’s every nook and cranny, which inevitably requires us to know the course inside-out. It’s kind of like doing primary school comprehension where you search for the answers to copy to fit into the question, except that this kind of stupidity is stopped by the time you reach secondary school. All is fine until the ambiguous situations. So in line 10 of page 6 it’s stated that Apples are green, and line 18 on page 14 hinted that Apples are red. Then you start questioning yourself what the colour of Apples is to no end.
It’s a flawed exam format. One would then to try and memorise the facts after the scrutiny, but being a third year student would have sounded the alarm that the examiners are no saints. So we have no choice but to also prepare things that are not indicated in the given case. Life is dark and grey leading to the exams.
Most people should enter in the exams hall in a state of haze- the perfect time for the first question to knock us unconscious. Question 1(b) asks something like “Do you think diversification has led to reduced costs and/or increased differentiation“. Then you thought to yourself, ok the “reduced cost” part is simple, just do some computations on the financial figure. Then you wonder. WTF is “increased differentiation”? How do you prove “increased differentiation”? If a MacDonald’s Big Mac is a differentiated product from a Cheeseburger, then is the recent MegaMac an increased differentiation? How do you increase the uniqueness of something and how do you determine it? I had to take the view that the question is stupid and had to fight off the urge to pen down such a thought.
You move on to scan part (c), which says “Using the financial figures to support your case in (b)”. That’s it. The Coup de Grace. You go bongus, does it mean we are not supposed to do any financial calculations in (b)? How do we support ‘decreasing cost’ part without using figures?
And then there are question 2, question 3 (insert endless sub-parts) and question 4, which is basically impossible to complete all reasonably if you take some time to analyse certain questions, which I supposed, is REQUIRED. It’s also terribly meaningless to not be allowed an open book exam when most questions cannot be answered without tweaking your understanding.
With this I complete my 1000 word rant of the entire course. Give me another infinite days and I probably can’t write 100 words to answer that first question. If this is not an indication of how woefully flawed this course has turned out to be, nothing will. Learning is in making one learn, not in making him feel stupid and helpless.
/Rant.
