Enhancing Decision Making Skills among Postgraduate Students Using Alternative Assessment Approach

Postgraduate learning in Malaysian public or private universities has undergone tremendous shift in its landscape that a continuous diversity of trends has emerged where postgraduate programmes are now offered to a large number of local and foreign postgraduate students. One of the expected aspects of being postgraduates means having to make decisions that are not only wise, but also sound and apt. This requires postgraduates to acquire high level and value decision making skills that would prevent them from making catastrophic decisions such as choosing the right subject matter to investigate, supervisors and appropriate research instruments. Thus, the purpose of this study is to enhance the level of decision-making skills among master students in Strategic Management course using alternative assessment. Using explorative qualitative approach, this study employed an action research where participants' decision-making skills were evaluated followed by intervention treatments that would help them to make better decisions. Ten postgraduate students were asked to complete a self-filled questionnaire and participated in focus group discussion in the first phase of the data collection. SWOT analysis and presentation rubric were used as intervention tools in this study. Results indicated an increase of score from 79% to 85% at the end of the assessment. This concludes that the alternative assessment helps students to make better decisions. The findings illustrated that alternative assessment is different from the restrictive forms of traditional assessment and is advantageous to students, stakeholders, employers, funding bodies and others as it helps to establish capabilities and competencies as well as academic knowledge.