As the world becomes more and more complex, technical skills alone are insufficient for the needs of many jobs. To become an accomplished professional in today’s workforce, you will need to understand how people behave at work, work well with others, and be able to manage people regardless of whether your job title has the word ‘manager’ in it!
BU8601 is an introductory course for non-business undergraduates to help you understand, think and act like managers. Knowledge and skills gained from this course will help you in any situation where you need to manage yourself and other people. This includes other university courses, final year projects, internship experiences, and eventually your careers.
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Year Taken: AY 19/20, Sem 1
Class Participation and Tutorials 10%
Group Project 30%
Final Exam 60%A lot of people took this module to clear GERPE(BM) requirements. There were also a lot of exchange students. These mean that the bell curve was relatively lenient. This class is about management theories, based on a lot of assumptions.
The tutorial was held once every two weeks, and the professor asked each table to share their answer. I was placed into a group of 3 other Singaporeans in Week 2, and one of them was trying to push the group as he was not planning to S/U. The other two members looked like they wanted to S/U the module. For me, I didn’t think much and just tried my best for the group project.
The group project was a 4,000-word-limit report on management of the future, and we had to do qualitative interviews with managers in real life. We actually went out to collect data, but one of my group members was talking about how we should fake interview data during the tutorial session. I facepalmed really hard at this guy’s lack of common sense, and we were fortunate that the professor did not hear it.
My group had 2 LMS students (the other LMS student was a freshie) while the other 2 members were from SPMS and Materials Engineering. Since I wanted to score, I initiated to synthesized everybody’s writings as I had 2 years of essay-writing experience. I wrote the report using a multi-disciplinary approach (I brought in psychology concepts) while being critical of the lecture content (I found the course content to be full of flawed assumptions). I was expecting a full A for this report because I knew everybody else just wanted to get a Pass for this module, and true enough, when the report grade was released in Week 13, my group got a full A for the report.
The final lecture was very important as all examinable content came from there. For my batch, the final lecture notes had 200+ slides. I spent three days studying the slides without touching the textbook. I found mind maps to be useful. The exam was basically in the short-answer format, and memorising the slides’ content is good enough. I ended up doing well. Moral of the story: you will be fine without the textbook, so just study the slides.
If you are looking to learn something practical, I do not recommend this class. I honestly feel that I learnt nothing from this class, despite doing well.
This review was reposted with the kind permission of aLMSstudent. Originally published at https://ntulmsmods.wordpress.com/2020/05/22/ntu-lms-year-3-sem-1/
June 28, 2021 -
Taken in: AY15 Sem 1
Grading components: Tutorial Participation (10%), Group Project (30%), Examination (60%)
Grade: SU
Difficulty rating: 1.5/5This was the very first elective I took in my university life so my memory on this is rather fuzzy already. There are tutorials once a fortnight and lectures were frankly quite optional – attendance was dropping with every lecture. The time I saw the most students was during the final revision lecture.
This mod is super easy to get into due to the large class size, so there will be lots of lower year students there. My group project was a nightmare as I had the worst group mates ever – one never did any work till he was threatened with the removal of his name off the group project, another had the worse English ever for a university student (I’m not trying to be condescending or anything, but it is problematic if barely anything she wrote was decent enough to be submitted). I knew I was screwed from my group project, so I decided to SU this mod even before sitting for the finals. Thankfully, the final report has a word count of 4,500, so it is possible to tank the entire group project by yourself should you not have the fortune of good teammates.
The final exams were closed book with open-ended questions and case studies – past year papers can also be found online on NTU library website. My friend who took this mod recently (in AY18 Sem 1), said the finals was rather manageable.
Would I recommend this module? Yes, for people looking to clear their business GER-PE, this mod isn’t too bad an option. There is a fair amount of content to memorize, but it is definitely passable if you plan to SU. For those planning to score and use electives to pull up your grade, I would think this mod is a decent option too – the final exams are scorable as long as you prepare well enough.
This review was reposted with the kind permission of The Beautiful Sotong. Originally published at https://thebeautifulsotong.com/2018/12/08/ntu-electives-review
June 11, 2021
