Within the Bachelor of Commerce degree offered at Deakin University students have the option of taking a major sequence of studies in the field of Insurance. Within this major students must understand the relationships between the business decisions made by an insurance company and the financial operation of the business as expressed in the profit and loss statement and the balance sheet.
To develop and assess students' learning in this regard they are required to submit a written assignment explaining the relationship between the operational decisions of a such a company and the end of year accounts. Typically these exercises suffer from a number of problems. Firstly, giving all students the same data potentially leads to a degree of plagiarism but generating individual assignments is excessively time consuming for the instructor. Secondly, students have little feel for the numbers presented to them, having no initial insight into the rationale behind the decisions made.
In an attempt to alleviate these difficulties a Windows based experiential learning exercise has been developed. In this program, known as The General Insurance Market Instructional Computer Simulation (G.I.M.I.C.S.), groups of students make business decisions (such as premium, commission, credit terms and reinsurance levels) in competition with one another and a market simulation model processes these decisions and presents the participants with their companies' end of year financial position, along with the year's operating decisions for all of the companies in their market. This approach solves the problem with little instructor effort and gives the students an interest in their companies' success and hence a better feel for the numbers and relationships which they must describe.
This paper presents the structure, operation and use of the GlMICS program.
