Tiêu đề MN2177 - Core Management Concepts - 2020 Examiners Commentaries.pdf ✅

MN2177 Core management concepts 2 In the examination you must read the questions carefully to make sure you have understood them; choose the questions you wish to answer from the list available and manage your time carefully. You should always check the instructions on the examination paper before you begin and follow them carefully. Candidates who do well in this examination show an ability in five areas: 1. Identifying and making use of the correct content in the subject guide Your capacity to draw on relevant material in the subject guide is central to being able to construct an answer worthy of a good mark. Here you need to do two key activities. First, make use of the essential material in the subject guide that could illuminate the question. For example, if you are asked a question about Mintzberg’s Structure in Fives, then this is the material to focus on. Not Mintzberg’s management theory that is also covered in the syllabus, and not other forms of organisational structure. You might choose to mention them, but they should not be the focus of your attention. Second, make sure that you discuss only the issues that are relevant to the question at hand. For example, if you are asked to talk about why employers agree to negotiate with unions, a detailed account of the history of unions is surplus to requirements. You will not get a good mark if you simply repeat the material from the subject guide. You must understand it and put it in the correct order and format for the question. 2. Clearly and fully answering the question that is being asked This is an issue not only of identifying the correct content, as above, but also being clear on how the question is asking you to use it. For example, if you are asked to ‘Compare and contrast the Hawthorne Studies with Scientific Management’, we would be looking for an answer that splits its time/page space equally between the two areas, looking for similarities and differences. If you were asked to ‘Critically evaluate the Hawthorne Studies in terms of their relevance for today’s workplace’, you would be spending the vast majority of your answer using evidence to assess the value of the Hawthorne Studies for understanding what is going on at work today. You would be focusing heavily on the Hawthorne Studies. You could easily write a whole answer with no mention of another theory, and do very well, as long as you were critically evaluating. Also essential is to make sure that you answer all parts of the question and respond fully to each. If it is a question with two parts, then do both. If it is a question that specifically says you need to use examples and/or theories to justify your answer, then you should do so. These will be clearly stated in the marking guide and it will be hard for you to do well without undertaking these tasks. Note that none of the questions (not even those based on the finance, accounting, and investment management areas) ask you to perform calculations. Neither do they specify that you need to draw diagrams nor write out balance sheets or income statements. Therefore, you should bear in mind that there are likely to be few marks available for doing so before you spend your time on this. Diagrams and short calculations used to illustrate a point can be helpful, but they will not attract a large share of marks on their own. 3. Drawing on a range of sources to support your answer and demonstrate your knowledge This is a wide-ranging module and as such we are not expecting you to spend your revision time memorising long lists of theorists. You have enough to do in remembering the key ones (for example, Porter, Mintzberg, Kahneman) alongside the large syllabus. What we do want to see is that you have engaged

MN2177 Core management concepts 4 5. Giving your answer an effective structure There are a range of actions you should take to organise your answers that will help the examiners to see what you are trying to do and award you marks accordingly: a) Write an introduction: Introductions are most effective when they demonstrate how you intend to answer the question. The examiner intuitively knows what you are planning to do and can then read your answer looking for this clear, logical structure. b) Break your answer into paragraphs (and sections): Breaking your text up into paragraphs makes it much easier to read. The points you are trying to make are illuminated more clearly in your answer. This works even better if you can try to use the first sentence of your paragraph to signpost what this paragraph is going to do. For example, if you are writing an essay talking about why employers negotiate with unions, and you have just presented all the reasons why it can help organisational performance, you may then want to start a section about the industries where it is not so beneficial. You might begin this with a signpost sentence, such as, ‘However, there are a range of industries in which negotiating with unions can reduce firm performance, but managers have little choice’. You have made it clear to the reader what the paragraph is going to talk about and you can now go on to elaborate. c) Plan the main body of your essay: Time can feel tight in the exam, but there is usually a benefit to spending a minute at the beginning of each question sketching out a very rough plan for your question. It is particularly important for questions with multiple parts because it will make sure that you do not get carried away with writing and totally forget about the second half of what you are being asked to do. d) Use subheadings: It is also perfectly acceptable (and even encouraged!) in this module to use subheadings to divide up your answer. Because we often set candidates questions that have two or three components, organising your answer by using these as headings can show that you have covered all the key points. These subheadings might be the same as the main sections you identify you need to cover in your plan. You will find it helps you to organise your answer. It also helps examiners to extract the key points you are trying to make. e) Conclusion: Even if it is only a couple of sentences, making sure that you provide a conclusion to your answer, which offers a very brief summary of key points from the body of the essay to answer to the question, is essential. Feedback on the exam this year As the exam moved online this year, it is hard to draw comparisons between this and previous years. We changed the questions slightly so that there was less of a focus on knowledge recall, and more of a focus on analysis. Generally, candidates engaged well with the questions and the analytic requirements. Judicious use of readings, examples and other evidence sources was considerably stronger, as we would expect to see when candidates have open access to all that the internet holds. However, that also brings with it temptations, and we saw too many candidates rely on dubious sources; classmates; and essay-posting websites. Rather than seeing a higher mark profile in such papers, we saw a much lower one.