The Mother of All CP

Class Participation (or CP) is one of those things that an MBA student at the Asian Institute of Management will love or hate.

Being a business school that employs Harvard's Case Method, professors put a great weight to how the MBA students put forward their ideas and points to the class discussions and how well they articulate these points. CP grade often constitutes at least a third of a student's final grade, and sometimes it accounts for 100%! So you could imagine the pressure on the MBA student in class to deliver good CP-- his/her survival in the classroom jungle (yeah, the classes can really get "jungle-like" often times, with folks trying to get the better of everyone.)

The common notion the students subscribe to is the concept of the one great point that will stop the show, one great CP that will make the whole class bow down to the point and subject the student to momentary adulation-- "The Mother of All CP."

I myself have thought that it would take one helluva point to make it through every class. I'd spend so many minutes cooking up that thought in my head, but more often than not, that bright spark of a CP never came.

After much frustration in the past, I let go of this notion of the "Mother of All CP" and just said what was in my mind, show-stopper or not. But it was this letting go that made my MBA life easier-- The Mother of All CP was as elusive as Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster, so why put so much stress on myself to find it? The funny thing is that after adopting this mantra, I felt the quality of my points got better in class discussions.

What happened to me may not apply to all, but it's one perspective worth looking at. The Mother of All CP, that heroic, hail mary, show-stopping point may come, but it may all be over when it does.