ranked against the instructor's own sessions
IE 5617 Lean Concepts and Applications, Summer I 2025 · an end-of-term poll ranking all 17 class sessions · and what I wrote to a student contesting a grade
In Summer I 2025 I redesigned and then taught two modules of IE 5617 Lean Concepts and Applications. Process Control and Six Sigma Basics, built around a bean process simulation, and Quality Tools and Topics, built around an F hunt and an M&M Pareto exercise.
At the end of term the instructor polled students on all seventeen class sessions. Mine placed 3rd and 7th. Those are the two sessions I had rebuilt.
Prof. Hugh McManus sent me the ranked list himself on 26 June 2025:
“Just did the course feedback, here is a ranked list of the students favorite classes. The ones you did came out higher than when I do them, and pretty high overall. The scale (a legacy from the origins of the class) is -2 to +2; on a more traditional 1 to 5 scale you got a 4.8 and a 4.67.”
All seventeen sessions, as ranked
| Rank | Session | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lean Thinking III (process map) | 1.90 |
| 2 | Lean Thinking V, Value Stream Mapping | 1.86 |
| 3 | Process Control and Six Sigma Basics (bean process) | 1.81 |
| 4 | The Start of your Lean Journey (intro, 6S exercise) | 1.71 |
| 5 | Lean Thinking I-II (SIPOC and Waste Hunt) | 1.71 |
| 6 | Big Simulation Exercise (Lego airplanes, clinics, PD jobs, VR) | 1.71 |
| 7 | Quality Tools and Topics (F hunt, M&M Pareto) | 1.67 |
| 8 | Lean Healthcare (wastes survey) | 1.63 |
| 9 | Midterm and Final Reviews | 1.57 |
| 10 | Leadership (videos) | 1.54 |
| 11 | People (job satisfaction brainstorm and dot vote) | 1.48 |
| 12 | Lean Thinking IV (detailed time and capacity analysis) | 1.45 |
| 13 | Variability Simulations (poker chip sim, computer sim) | 1.35 |
| 14 | Implementation (A3) | 1.33 |
| 15 | Lean Supply Chain (characteristics) | 1.30 |
| 16 | Plant Tour (video) | 1.29 |
| 17 | Lean Engineering (DFX discussion) | 1.17 |
Rows 3 and 7 are mine. The poll runs on a legacy scale from minus two to plus two. Adding three maps it onto one to five, so 1.81 becomes 4.81 and 1.67 becomes 4.67, against a top score of 1.90 for the highest-rated session in the course.
Listening is not conceding
Grading is where a teaching philosophy gets tested, because it is where being liked and being useful come apart. When a student in that course challenged a homework grade, some of what I wrote back was this:
“You did a great work, that is why you got a 9.4 not a 6 or 7, which would mean you were lacking some basic understanding of the subject. I used a very strict rubric for HW5, which means many other students in the class lost credit for the same things you did. But here are some clarifications of what was expected.”
Three numbered points followed, each naming what the work did oposed to what the standard asked for. The data may have supported the claim but the plot showed contradicted it. The number of points tested was too small to support any conclusion, even a correct one. And the extra credit asked for a critical discussion of real-world trade-offs rather than an answer.
Then I taught the thing the assignment was actually for:
“Reducing by 30 percent the variability of a process in the real world is super hard. The challenge of reducing variability would sometimes not even make it worth it, even when reducing variability is the only measure that has no trade-off on WIP, cycle time, or flow. There is always a trade-off. The beauty of lean is that implementing some of the simple Lean strategies will make variability go down, and even a small reduction improves the system a lot.”
And then the boundary:
“I am available tomorrow at any time from 10 to noon, if you still want to meet. But I want to be clear that I won’t change the grade or rubric. I am available for more clarifications on the exercise and concepts, not for me to justify my grading again. The rubric is based on the professor’s recommendations, and I followed it with all the other students in the class. It wouldn’t be fair to change it just for you if I still think the rubric used was correct.”
Listening to students is the argument of my teaching, and it would be a weak argument if listening meant conceding. Fairness to one student is consistency with the other twenty. The student is not identified here and their own message is not quoted.