How to make a decision

How to make a decision

DECISION MAKING

• Making an important decision such as which university or degree course to choose can be very difficult. But we all make decisions on a regular basis such as which mobile phone to buy, where to meet up with friends, which festival to go to, and if you have a job you will make many decisions whilst doing it. So you will already have ways to make decisions but you may not have have thought through how you do this. The following decision making techniques you may already know, but whether or not you do, it is worth reviewing them to ensure you can use techniques to help you make objective make decisions:

SWOT Analysis

• This is a business tool that is used to analyse the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in a variety of situations and can easily be applied to making decisions about university and degree courses e.g. by creating a table using these headings and listing the characteristics of a number of universities and/or degree courses.

• Click here to find out how to use the technique in more detail.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST

• This is a technique that many of the comparison websites use, but you can create one that suits your own needs.

• The steps to create a compare and contrast chart are:

  • identify the things that are important to you in a university or degree course e.g. small class sizes, good sporting facilities.

  • create a chart similar to the example below - in this example only two degree courses have been included but you can include up to five degree courses as per your UCAS application form, or the number of acceptance offers you have received.

  • In the degree columns write down whether or not the university or subject meets your criteria

  • Give each criteria a mark out of 10 (where 10 strongly matches your criteria)

  • Total up the ratings