Write a data research on the benefits of management course.The mid-term is a written assignment due by midnight on the last day of week 7 where students will choose a company that they aspire to work for, find a recent (past 4 months) story about them in the business press that highlights a challenge faced by their management team and propose a path forward. The assignment should be a maximum of 10 typed, 12-point font, double-spaced pages. A detailed grading rubric will be posted on Moodle.
Some tips for finding articles: choose a company you’re interested in and google that company name + recent news. The search results will give you all of the recent articles about the company, and you can then choose one from a reputable source. Blog posts don’t count as a reputable source.
Doing external research on the company (beyond your article of choice) is fine. Doing external research on other business topics for strategic analysis is not. Keep in mind that as a midterm, it is meant to be testing your comprehension of the course content, so I need to see you apply the course readings as your analytical tools.
Using an already completed Porter’s Five Forces that you find online will not count as completing strategic analysis, as a warning for those of you choosing big companies.
I’ve made a minor update to the rubric. There’s a lot of anxiety surrounding appendices (what they are, how to format them, what goes in one, how to refer to them, etc), so I’ve removed that section of the rubric. Any appendices you provide will be graded under the appropriate analysis section, so feel free to provide them if you’ve already made them or if you like working with appendices—but for those of you who are anxious about appendices, no need to provide them. The 5% for that section of the rubric has now been transferred over to citations, to reflect both my desire for strong academic honesty and a stronger stance on it, given that there have been some academic dishonesty issues in this course in the past. All other rubric content is remaining the same. The rubric is updated on the eClass file, on the submission link, and I’ve attached it for you here.
