Hand over the prompt, the scoring guide and the dispute you have been asked to work with, and a premium original sample comes back inside 24 to 48 hours, mapped to the Distinguished descriptors and revised at no cost until the criteria are met. The record reads COM-FPX3700, Conflict Resolution, worth 3 points, one of the options in the Communication category of the FlexPath general education menu, which requires at least 22.5 points in total with a floor of 2 points in each of its four categories. Its 3000-level number is worth checking against whatever upper-division minimum your own bachelor's program sets, since the same course is taken by undergraduates in several of them.
What COM-FPX3700 actually grades
Everyone arrives at this course with opinions about conflict and the criteria are not interested in them. What gets scored is whether you can describe a dispute in terms a stranger could check, choose a response with reasons attached, and say what would tell you the response worked. The deliverables usually give you a case, or invite you to bring a deidentified one of your own, and then look for that sequence. Diagnosis, framework, choice, plan, evaluation. Papers that jump from the story straight to advice lose the two criteria in the middle, which is where most of the points live.
The diagnosis has vocabulary attached and the vocabulary is graded. Karen Jehn's 1995 study of intragroup conflict separated disagreement about the work itself from friction between the people, and her later work added a third kind, the dispute about how the work gets allocated and scheduled. Keeping those apart changes the whole response. A quarrel about which vendor to use is answered with information. A quarrel about who was left off an email is not, and treating it as though it were is why so many meetings solve a problem that nobody actually had. Level matters too, since a conflict between two colleagues, a conflict between two departments, and a conflict with a policy behind it call for different people in the room.
Then the course wants a named framework, applied rather than mentioned. The five conflict modes described by Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann in 1974, competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating, sit on two dimensions, how far you push your own concern and how far you attend to the other party's, and they extend the managerial grid that Robert Blake and Jane Mouton published in 1964. Interest-based bargaining is the other framework these assessments lean on, from Roger Fisher and William Ury's 1981 book, which separates the people from the problem, works from interests rather than stated positions, generates options before choosing, judges them against an objective standard, and asks each side to know its alternative if no agreement is reached. Naming a framework earns nothing. Running your case through every one of its parts is the criterion.
The last graded strand is your own conduct on the page. Conflict writing slides into character assessment faster than any other genre, and character assessment is unverifiable, which makes it unscorable. Report what was said, when, in front of whom, and what happened next. Explain the other party's behavior with the situation they were standing in before reaching for what kind of person they are, since we reliably do the reverse for other people and the reverse of the reverse for ourselves.
How we help in this course
Drafts for 3700 are built framework first. Tell us the case, the framework your courseroom is using, and which party you are writing as, and the sample will run the dispute through that framework part by part, with the mode or the strategy chosen on stated grounds and its cost admitted rather than hidden. Where the assessment asks for a conversation, the draft includes the actual words: an opening that states the purpose without assigning blame, a paraphrase that proves you heard the other side, the interests laid beside each other, two or three options, and a date to check whether the agreement held.
The rest is the studio standard. A premium original sample inside 24 to 48 hours, written to the Distinguished column of your own guide, then passed through eight people including a criterion by criterion review and a separate APA and originality pass. Revisions are free until the score arrives, faculty feedback returns into the same cycle without a charge, and because an attempt can sit with faculty for two business days, the review passes exist to keep you from spending that window on a fixable omission.
The assessments, one by one
Assessment 1
The opening deliverable in Conflict Resolution usually asks you to describe a dispute before you do anything about it, and the description is where most of the marks are. Read the full Assessment 1 manual.
Assessment 2
The middle deliverable in Conflict Resolution usually asks you to apply a named framework rather than mention one, and applied means running your case through every part of it. Read the full Assessment 2 manual.
Assessment 3
The final deliverable in Conflict Resolution usually asks the question the earlier ones set up: how would you know whether the resolution held. Read the full Assessment 3 manual.
How to actually write COM-FPX3700: where to begin
Take the scoring guide apart first and let its rows become your headings, because the guide is what earns the marks and the prompt only sets the scene. Then write the case before you write anything clever about it. Two or three paragraphs of observable record, who did what, in what order, with the words that were actually used, gives the rest of the paper something to hold. Most drafts fail here by summarizing the conflict as a personality clash in one line and then analyzing a story the reader cannot see.
Work through the case with a concrete example in mind. Two coworkers share responsibility for a monthly report. One insists it be finished every Thursday, the other says Thursday is impossible. Those are positions. Underneath them are interests, and interests are the level where agreements exist: the first has an audit review each Friday morning and gets asked for the numbers in it, the second covers the front desk alone on Thursdays and cannot get an uninterrupted hour. Neither interest contradicts the other. Options appear the moment they are written down, so the report can go out Wednesday evening, or the audit section alone can arrive Thursday with the remainder Monday, or the desk can be covered for ninety minutes. The objective standard is the published audit calendar rather than either person's preference, and the alternative both sides face if nothing is agreed, a supervisor imposing a schedule neither one likes, is what makes them willing to trade.
Then keep the evidence honest, which is the discipline this course teaches under the surface. Carsten De Dreu and Laurie Weingart published a meta-analysis in 2003 that found both relationship conflict and task conflict associated with lower team performance, which cuts against the seminar slogan that task conflict is healthy and relationship conflict is not. That finding is correlational, drawn largely from field studies of existing teams, so it cannot tell you the direction of the arrow. Write that sentence into your paper. A claim reported with its design and its limit is the shape of the Distinguished column, while the same claim asserted flatly is the shape of the one below it, and here the difference is one clause.
| Section | What goes in it | What Distinguished looks like |
|---|---|---|
| The case | Parties by role, the sequence of events, and what was said, deidentified where needed. | A record specific enough that a reader could disagree with your reading of it. |
| Diagnosis | Conflict type, the level it sits at, the stage it has reached, and what is genuinely at stake. | Type and level named and defended from the record, not asserted in a sentence. |
| Framework applied | One named framework, cited to its source, run across every part of the case. | Every element of the framework used, including the ones that do not flatter your side. |
| The response chosen | The mode or strategy selected, the reason it fits these stakes, and what it costs. | A trade-off stated openly, with the option you rejected and the reason you rejected it. |
| The conversation plan | Opening, listening moves, the proposal, the fallback, and who else needs to be there. | Language a reader can imagine being spoken, including how you would handle a refusal. |
| Evaluation and references | What would show the agreement held, when it gets checked, and current APA both ways. | A check with a date and an owner, plus primary citations for every framework named. |
Developing the synthesis
Two frameworks in one paper only work if you say how they relate. The five modes describe a tendency, drawn from a self-report instrument, so they tell you what a person is likely to reach for. Interest-based bargaining prescribes a procedure, so it tells you what to do next regardless of tendency. Held together they produce a useful line: a habitual accommodator can still run a structured negotiation, but needs the objective standard written down in advance, because the standard is what holds when the instinct to concede arrives. Culture belongs in the same discussion, hedged properly, since directness that reads as honest in one workplace reads as aggression in another and the research describes averages rather than the person in front of you. Close by naming what your approach cannot fix, which in most cases is a difference in authority that no amount of skilled conversation removes.
Citations that survive faculty review
Three kinds of source do the work in a conflict paper. Peer-reviewed research in organizational behavior, negotiation and applied psychology, pulled through the Capella library from Business Source Complete and PsycINFO, supports any claim about what an approach does to outcomes, and a meta-analysis outranks a single study when both exist. Primary sources carry the frameworks, so Thomas and Kilmann are cited for the modes and Fisher and Ury for interest-based negotiation, rather than the textbook chapter that summarizes them, which an evaluator can spot in the reference list without reading a word of your prose. Institutional material is the third kind, meaning the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service on how mediation runs, your organization's grievance policy, or a union contract clause, each cited as the document it is. Two habits keep you accurate. Check whether a study measured self-reported satisfaction or an observed outcome, and never report a score from a proprietary instrument you did not administer.
The mistakes that land Basic instead of Distinguished
- Collaborating chosen as the answer to everything. It is expensive in time and trust, and a paper that never says when it is not worth it has skipped the judgment being graded.
- Motive stated as fact. He wanted to undermine me is a conclusion, and the criteria can only reward what the record shows.
- Positions renamed as interests. If the interest section restates the same demand in softer words, the framework has not been applied.
- A framework named once and abandoned. One paragraph of theory followed by four of narrative reads as decoration, and it is scored that way.
- No test of the outcome. An agreement with nothing to check and no date attached leaves the evaluation criterion with nothing to grade.
COM-FPX3700 questions students actually ask
Do I have to write about a conflict from my own job?
Only if the prompt says so, and many prompts leave it open. A remembered dispute gives you detail no invented case can match, which is why it usually scores better, but it has to be handled carefully. Change the names, describe people by role, remove the detail that would identify the workplace to anyone who knows it, and say in one line that the account has been deidentified. If nothing from your own history fits, a published case works, and so does a documented public dispute where the record is available to your reader. What does not work is a scenario so thin that every party wants the obvious thing, since a case with no competing interests gives the framework nothing to grip.
The prompt says apply a conflict framework but does not name one. Which do I pick?
Pick by what the case needs, then say why in one sentence. If the assessment centers on how people habitually respond, the five conflict modes give you the vocabulary and the two underlying dimensions of assertiveness and cooperativeness. If the case is a negotiation with something to divide, interest-based bargaining fits better, because it supplies positions, interests, options, objective criteria and the alternative each side holds if no deal is reached. If the assessment is about a team, the split between task, relationship and process conflict is the sharper tool. Use one framework thoroughly rather than three in passing, since applied depth is what the top column describes and a tour of models is what the Basic column looks like.
Is avoiding always the wrong response?
No, and saying so is one of the cheapest ways to show you understood the reading. Avoiding is the right choice when the issue is genuinely trivial, when tempers need hours rather than minutes, when you have no authority over the outcome, or when the cost of the fight exceeds anything winning it would return. It becomes a failure when it is permanent, because the unaddressed issue tends to return attached to something else and larger than it was. The defensible version in a paper is a bounded one: state what you are setting aside, for how long, and what will bring it back to the table, which is a decision rather than a retreat.
Conflict analysis due?
Send the case, the criteria and the framework your courseroom uses. The draft comes back with the diagnosis, the choice and the conversation written out. First premium sample free.