AC Case Business Merger By Ganesh Shermon

Case Distortion in Evaluations - Jill Avery from HBS, JMM Spring 2014, writes, “Instructors often struggle to assess students’ class participation during a case discussion. Facilitating a case discussion puts instructors under heavy cognitive load, diminishing their resources available for reliable assessment (Chylinski, 2010). 
 
Because case discussions do not follow a linear path, but rather primarily take their direction from student comments, case instructors must be flexible and nimble to ensure that learning objectives are met, and must concomitantly orchestrate the discussion and assess students’ class participation. 
 
Instructors often suffer from reconstructive memory effects that often cause them to use faulty heuristics (e.g., attendance) to assess participation when they cannot remember more significant information (Chylinski, 2010). 
 
Frequency and recency effects distort instructors’ assessments, and global assessments may dominate over the course of the semester, rather than specific evidence demonstrated each week in the classroom. 
 
Subjective biases plague all instructors and efforts to hold them at bay diminish, but do not eliminate them. Particularly for new instructors, grading participation during a case discussion is a challenging endeavor”.