Team, Transform & Transmit unit test

Reflection as a habit

Handoffs between speakers

Designing slides for a defense

The most common team failure

Team presentation structure

Resolving team disagreement

Reading the exam sources under time

Anticipating defense questions

Visuals that carry argument

Academic integrity policy

Delivery basics that are scored

Transferring Seminar skills to Research

This course has no free-response prompt tagged to this unit, so one from elsewhere in the course is used. It is still worth writing — the skill transfers.

END-OF-COURSE EXAM, PART B (90 minutes, 24 points). Read the four sources, summarized below, focusing on a theme or issue that connects them and the different perspective each represents. Then write a logically organized, well-reasoned, and well-written argument presenting your own perspective on the theme or issue you identified. You must incorporate at least two of the sources, cited as Source A–D or by author, and link your claims to supporting evidence. The four sources (connected by the theme of WORK), summarized in our own words: SOURCE A — Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). In the opening chapter of Book I, Smith describes a pin factory in which the work is divided among specialized operations, so that ten workers can produce many thousands of pins a day where each working alone could scarcely make one. He presents the division of labor as the principal source of the increase in productive power. Much later, in Book V, he argues that a man who spends his life performing a few simple operations, the effects of which are always the same, has no occasion to exercise his understanding, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become — and he proposes public education as a partial remedy. SOURCE B — Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). Taylor argues that traditional craft work wastes enormous effort because each worker uses methods learned informally and varies in efficiency. He proposes that management study each task systematically, determine the single best method and the optimal time for it, select and train workers to that method, and take responsibility for planning away from the worker. He presents this as beneficial to workers, since higher output permits higher wages, and describes his time studies at Bethlehem Steel as demonstrating large gains in output per worker. SOURCE C — Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974). Terkel presents oral histories of Americans in a wide range of occupations, transcribed largely in the speakers' own voices. In the book's introduction he characterizes work as being about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, and observes that many of his interviewees describe violence to the spirit as well as to the body. The accounts include workers who find purpose in ordinary jobs and workers in prestigious ones who describe their days as empty, and Terkel presents the variation without resolving it. SOURCE D — David Graeber, "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," Strike! Magazine, August 2013, and the survey work it prompted. Graeber, an anthropologist, argues that a large and growing share of employment consists of jobs the people holding them believe to be pointless — administrative, managerial, and clerical roles that could disappear without any noticeable effect. He notes that Keynes predicted a fifteen-hour week by the century's end, that productivity gains have been more than sufficient to deliver it, and that the hours were absorbed instead by the proliferation of such positions. Polling conducted afterward found that a substantial minority of British and Dutch respondents said their own job made no meaningful contribution to the world.