Regarding the Assessment Centre
The first AC I participated as an observer after I wrote so many proposals on AC&DC ran smoothier and finished earlier than I had anticipated, as Arvid, according to what I heard and concurred by Jenny, usually is very challenging and thus would spend a lot of time for harmonisation.
It's rather interesting to see the MBA students doing group discussion (anyway neither of them did not do well in self-presentation in terms of expectation). Given their education and work experience (at least five years), we had expected more from them, but such a polite discussion with all superficial idesa/points was, like Jenny said, "a chewing gum": one was repeating the points of another, and no one really delved deep to see how we can at least have some feasible plan to realise or execute what they havd come up with. There was no one had a guiding influence over the group, in terms of either the content or the organisation&planning. This actually undermined the performance of the whole group. If there were someone came out a little bit aggressively to organise, direct and summarise, the results should be better.
PS: as we have observed, one's manner during the discussion (lean on the desk or put cheek in your hand) would affect your score very probably, especialy in terms of Team Competence.
As to self reflection, usually everyone would say something they should have done or done better as what they have actually done or done satisfyingly.
Individual Exercise was also an interesting part (another group) as two did not actually address one core issue of the problem, one brought out cliche or common sense without any creative points, and one completely misunderstood the problem despite that she has come up with sth in the final results. Such individual exercise (case analysis in some sense) should have a good structure from analysis, measures to some rough action plan. And when presenting, address the audiences and use flipchart and colour markers to visualise your idea.
The final result was not that satisfying. Strictly speaking only one had passed. Maybe direct recruitment AC would be another sense.