MGMT20011: Business Negotiations

20% tutorial prep and participation, 30% reflective essay, 50% take home exam

Firstly, this review is overall quite positive and quite different to the previous review (I believe the course has changed quite a bit). I was quite happy with having done this through my winter holidays however note: I'm writing this before receiving my results so I have no idea if the assessment marking is any good.

Business Negotiations extends for 10 days. Each day you attend a 2hour lecture at 9am which isn't mandatory at all. Coming into the first lecture Adam said to do well in this subject, you don't have to do the readings or really even attend lectures. The first few days reiterated the 'experiential' nature of this subject, and to do well you just have to put some effort in. The content on the lectures is actually quite interesting - sort of dissecting different aspects of negotiation aimed at forming this "toolkit" for you in negotiations. It begins going through sort of psychological decision making and identifying different biases that can be capitalised on and that sort of thing. This only goes for 1 lecture so calmmm. After this lecture, it became a lot more relevant - identifying and reiterating the fundamental tension of negotiation; whether to cooperate or compete with the other party. I don't have too much to say about lectures, I suggest you attend and take notes of what Adam says because I found them useful in doing the exam as the slides themselves are just a few keywords that he elaborates on. Granted, this subject was literally at the start of the pokemon go craze, so I don't know how much I missed but the bits I did write down helped.

After the lecture, you attend a 1hr 15min tutorial. I had my tutorial at 11:30 so I was done quite early - that's the good thing about the subject. Anyway, the tutorials are literally so god damn fun. Each day throughout the 2weeks you're given a page or two of information relating to a particular role (seller or buyer usually). The information (except for maybe 2 days) was quite small so it doesn't take too long to read. Anyway, you go home and use this information to prepare a 'negotiation preparation document' which at the first few days is probably about 250 words long, but can get wayyyy longer towards the end of the course. By the last day, my prep doc was over 1000 words (it's kinda easy though, cos you can just copy some of the stuff you put on your previous one anyway). You submit these prep docs each night before 11pm on LMS and these form some of your grade. 20% is assigned to tutorial preparation and participation - i'm not sure how much is assigned to what but you get 4 of your preparation documents marked (randomly) to provide feedback. Ok, so after doing your prep doc, you come to class the next day and negotiate! You get assigned to someone else of a different role in your class and then spend 30-60minutes negotiating. Generally, everyone here is to have fun so negotiating is quite fun and I could hardly keep a straight face in some of them. The general idea of them is to (pretty much) fail, and then the lecture the next day goes through key failures and stuff. You enter your negotiation results online and then Adam puts them in a graph or something similar and goes through it in the lecture, identifying where people often fault in these negotiations. The tutorials are definitely the most important part of the course. The negotiations also change; for the final negotiation, it extends 2 days and involves 5 different parties negotiating for an agreement. This kind of makes it crazy to discuss, especially with people forming alliances and different sort of things. Like honestly, I cannot fathom how fun it was even though I got screwed over.

This final negotiation forms the basis of your individual reflective essay. We had a 1250 word limit, and we were to write a critical essay on our negotiation with references to key negotiation theories that were touched on in class. The word limit makes it quite hard to talk about everything that happened, but honestly it's not too hard to write.

The final assessment is a take-home exam thats worth 50% and is pretty much the same as a negotiation preparation document, except this exam has a 1750 word limit so it requires a bit more thinking. Plus some hypothetical questions are posed that are a bit more interesting. I don't think it was too hard honestly, it just takes a bit of time editing to make sure its under that word limit.

Honestly, I've probably missed so many things to talk about and I'll probably come back to update it later but I just want to say that it was a good break from the regular mundane subjects. All the people I know that took the subject have nothing but praise about it; it was pretty fun. Since the previous review of business negotiations it definitely has gone through a change and most likely will go through another change in future years. However, it is in a good spot now and I imagine the class size (was 300-400 this year) is going to increase exponentially.

AFTER ASSESSMENT: Ok so I'm getting around to editing this quite late and generally I wouldn't edit it after the assessment results come out however this has to be one of the most ridiculous grading schemes I've witnessed. Everyone's grade was scaled DOWN about 10-11 marks (I believe) and this severely reduced the impact of the final take-home exam (as most people would've aced it) and put more weight on the personal reflective essay. In this sense I felt personally impacted by the subjectivity of my tutor as the reviews on my essay conflicted with the instructions given by Adam in the lectures regarding the essay. Nonetheless, I finished with a H2A but take note - I put a ton of effort into this subject to make sure I got a H1 and I didn't.
I just want to reiterate: This subject is NOT an easy H1 and (presuming the subject stays relatively similar) if you want a H1, choose your tutor wisely. This edit comes ~4-5months after results released and you can tell I'm quite salty still. So you have been warned.

Yeah I believe so, some lectures it didn't work though.

Adam Barsky

Neg.

4.5 out of 5

I believe there is a book recommended for the course but Adam literally said it's not required. I don't know anyone that had the textbook

2week winter intensive subject. 3hr 15min per day for 2 weeks (10 days). This includes one 2hr lecture and one 1hr15min tutorial.

2016 July

For the 25% allocated to class participation, as long as you talked a lot and looked like you knew what you were talking about (either through enthusiasm or hand movements and not laughing), you'd score highly in it. The 25% is all about participation and trying, and not really about applying ideas from lectures.
The exam (would you believe it) was the easiest part of the course in my opinion. In addition to being a takehome exam where you're given 2 days to do it,

If you're looking for the easiest and quickest H1 possible, Business Negotiations is for you. This subject is so easy it's not even funny. You go through all the lectures and tutorials in 5 days, Monday to Friday. Classes run 9-5 with an hour break from 12:30-1:30pm. You do 2 lectures and 2 tutorials per day. They persistently stress that you do the pre-readings before you begin the subject as you will struggle otherwise, which is a load of bull by the way. While some of the readings are interesting, they are absolutely

Business Negotiations is a joke of a subject. I wouldn't even consider it a real subject. In a normal 12-week semester, the course content would probably end by week 3. Tutorials were useless and the exam was a complete joke. You could have received the exam without doing any of the readings, attending any lectures or tutes and still do well because it's all ripped word-for-word from the textbook anyway. As I said in the opening paragraph, if you want a quick and dirty H1, you've found the right subject. The only real selling point of Business Negotiations is that it runs in July and can be completely in a very very short time frame, on top of being easy.
The reasoning behind my rating comes down to the poorly thought-out and poorly executed tutorials and lack of sense of direction that the subject seemed to suffer from. The tutorials seemed to be strung together loosely a week before the subject was set to commence, however the lecture notes were quite good in their summation of the readings.

No

Peter Gahan

Lectures were incredibly boring (save the fact that Peter Gahan had a sense of humor but that's about it), and not needed to do well in the exam or even needed to have an idea of what to do in the tutorials. The good thing was that the lectures were a summary of all the pre-readings so if you can't be bothered reading all that crap just read the lecture notes and save yourself some time. The lectures were an absolute drainer! Thank goodness Peter plays a healthy amount of entertaining video clips throughout the lectures to break the otherwise dry content. On some days he also plays full films which you can skip and just watch at home after. There were also guest lectures in which one ditched at the last minute and the rest were boring anyway (feel free to go home when it's their turn to deliver their lecture)

Content wise the subject and lectures didn't provide too many in-depth skills and knowledge. If you possess common sense, you will do well.

No but you wouldn't need them if they existed anyway

2 Out of 5

Lewicki, R, J., Saunders, D, M., and Barry B. (2011). Essentials of Negotiation, 5th edition

Tutorials were almost completely unrelated to lectures which rendered them practically useless. I found that the tutorials were an absolute waste of time, unnecessary and did not further my understanding of the concepts covered in lectures. You could have done none of the pre-readings, attended no lectures and still do well in the tutorials because honestly, all the exercises (they call them "negotiation simulations" but not be fooled by the name) they gave were nothing more than shabby negotiation situations ripped off the internet and filled to the brim with loopholes and technical fallacies that required nothing but common sense to do well in. The tutorials had a poor focus and sense of direction because of this. Many people ended up negotiating things that were simply not considered in the problem sheet.

4 lectures and 2 tutorials a day for 5 days

July 2014

H1

The 10% for class participation is just for showing up to the tutorials (so show up to all of them and you are guaranteed at least 10% already).

The participation in the simulations just involves having fun and practicing your debating skills. It helps to apply what you have learnt as well, but they are mostly common sense. Comparing my mark for this to others, i found that those of us who scored highly were the ones who contributed to class discussions during the debriefing at the end which involves having participated in the negotiations. All you have to say is something like how the negotiation went, what you think, etc. It was not hard at all. They will give you a rubric before the week starts based on the marking for this, but really it is up to the tutor's opinion and as long as you have contributed, you will get the marks.

Now the essay i found was the most difficult piece of assessment, but that is not saying much. It involved a negotiation simulation on the last day followed by an essay write up in class. They gave us a marking criteria beforehand for what should be included in the essay and you just had to follow it. They give plenty of time to write it and most people finished early.

Finally, the exam (i use the term loosely). The take home exam is released the week after the subject is finished. It is available for 2 days. It consists of 50 multiple choice questions worth 0.5 marks each and 10 short answer questions worth 2.5 marks each. All the answers to these questions can be found in the textbook. With the multiple choice questions, most of them involved exact wording form the textbook. The first 25 mc questions involved A-E answers while the second half were true/false questions. The answers for the short answer questions could also be easily found in the textbook (except for 2 questions, one involving you talking about what you learnt the most throughout the week and another based on a movie we watched during a lecture)

Overall i found this a fun and not too challenging subject. if you have any questions, feel free to pm me.

Being an intensive subject, it can drag on a bit at times. It involves back to back tutorials and lectures. We started at 9 am everyday, had a lunch break for an hour at 12:30 and then continued and finished around 4-5 pm everyday. We were given a bunch of pre-readings before the week had begun on top of the textbook readings. Honestly, i did all the pre-readings and found that they were not that helpful. I did not do the prescribed textbook reading as they basically prescribed the whole book (and i never read the textbook anyway. )

No

Peter Gahan

I have to say that this is the best subject i have done at university so far. Peter is a fantastic lecturer and quite easy to follow. We learnt a variety of topics such as: communication, differing negotiation styles and different types of negotiation. The only problem i had with the lectures were that i found it hard to apply it to the assessment at times. The content could get a little dry but i found it interesting overall. Everyday Peter lined up a guest lecturer (although one cancelled), normally an individual who is an expert in negotiations, such as an AFL player manager. I liked the real life perspectives they offered and the experiences they shared.

No but a few sample question were given

4.5 Out of 5

Lewicki, R, J., Saunders, D, M., and Barry B. (2011). Essentials of Negotiation, 5th edition. In my opinion, you must have the textbook and i will explain why. Luckily it is easily found on the net.

Tutorials consisted of various 'negotiation simulations'. I found the tutorials one of the best parts of the course. By negotiation simulation, they basically mean little games. The simulations often involved things like negotiating over a used car or an international negotiation between 2 countries. It often involved working with little groups within your tutorial so you got to know everyone really well. Normally the tutor would just oversee things and give a debrief at the end. Time flew in the tutorials as we all had so much fun

4 lectures and 2 tutorials a day for 5 days

July 2014

H1