Value added characteristics for exam essays
January 10, 2009
I think about how to systematically think about value added characteristics of exam essays.
Value added characteristics for exam essays
In my last post, I reflected on both what recommendations I’ve had made to me about writing CGU IST screening exam questions, and on my own performance in writing practice essays. I said that you can break down the recommendations into informative, mandatory, and value added, and I said I didn’t have great coverage on the value added ones in the essays I’ve written thus far. Informative things are good rules to live by, but you can get along without them and do just fine. If you fail to provide the mandatory characteristics, you fail the question. The value-added characteristics may be what pushes you from M (master’s level) to D (doctoral level). Here are the value added recommendations:
- It is good if your answer finishes with a summary of current research in the area. I’ve started to take this to include mentioning areas that are ripe for research, also, because I feel like there’s no way I could discover and retain what researchers are doing in all these areas.
- It is good if you work IS theory into your answer: theory of planned behavior, media richness theory, systems theory, etc. Not the technology adoption model, as CGU IS faculty are generally critical of it.
- It’s good if you include analysis in terms of one of the popular business strategy/IS strategy frameworks: Porter’s 5 forces, the strategic grid, SWOT, Henderson and Venkatraman’s Strategic Alignment Model.
Thinking about the value added characteristics
I suppose that I’ve been largely answering from my gut when it comes to talking about the business implications of a technology. Using Porter’s five forces can give me a systematic way of doing that. You just think of each of the five parts of his model: suppliers, customers, new entrants, substitute products and rivalry from competitors (competition). Which parts of the model does the technology affect, and how? You can use the stategic grid to determine which kinds of businesses would best use the technology, or rather how each kind of business would do it.
Now I think I understand how some people said that they used Porter’s five forces in pretty much every answer. It’s probably because they were doing just what I mention above.
You could similarly use Benbesat and Zmud’s nomological net and contextual model of the organization to identify potential research areas for a topic, if you can’t think of anything specific that you know of. Or you can just apply your knowledge to estimate what specific things people must be looking at, because they’re clearly unanswered questions and are important. That’s probably harder than it sounds.
