On the Friday Nov 17th when I went to Zürich for a meeting and presentation related to my "European Entrepreneurship Accelerator" course, I missed one finance class because of the schedule conflict. (And I forgot to notify the professor that I was missing the class.) It so happened that about 20 students missed the same class the same day. Apparently, many didn't come to the class because of the random-dinner and BOW effect. Random Dinner is an annual event at IESE where Ist years are assigned randomly for dinner to the second year hosts (and vice versa, in the next semester). And BOW is the weekly "Bar of the Week" event which only starts from around midnight like any other Barcelona night life event. But there were also people who couldn't come to class for reasons like job interviews.

And guess what, there was a guest speaker invited for that class on that day. So the professor got understandably upset and gave all of the people who missed the class a report of minimum 4500 words (with 50% weight on grades) on a valuation of a company to work on. When we talked to him on why the students who had good reasons to miss the class were also punished, he had this line of reasoning:
Like with everything in life, there are innocent victims. If the whole class believes in a team, those people who didn't have a good reason to miss the class would offer to do the report for the innocent victims as well.
Apparently, some people did offer to do the double reports, one for himself/herself and one for one of the innocent victims.

So here I am today, just starting to work on this project after working on "Options and Futures" submission, Marketing paper and ENTAC presentation this long weekend. And it is due this Wednesday by noon. Wish me all the energy in completing the paper on time. What a coincidence that I had to miss the class on the same day when 20 others missed!

Labels: class, iese