The competition will include students from the five classes of OHS Inc., who will run a bake sale like a business. Members of the business community, including the Oswego Tea Co., Canal Commons Bakery, Cam’s Pizzeria, and Taste the World Foods, have been recruited as “consultants” to add real-life perspective and knowledge to the project and event.

With the assistance of the business consultants, the teams formulate a marketing plan, create a budget, and make decisions regarding how these bake sales will make the most profit. Some of the economic concepts they will have to implement are supply, demand, costs, revenues, profits, marketing, labor issues, government regulations, location, market analysis, and product differentiation.

According to OHS, Inc. Advisor Ben Richardson, the students receive a grade from the paper they write based on the bake sale competition. Even if a student does poorly in the bake sale, they can still get an “A” on the project, based on the quality of his or her analysis of the event.

The project is an example of what the educational community calls “authentic” or “performance based” assessment, which involves assessing students’ understanding of what they have learned by making them apply the knowledge in real-life situations.

The efficacy of this program has been effective enough to earn it the Leavy Award for Outstanding Business Education in 2007 from the American Freedoms Foundation.

The planning for the event took six days, and the consultants met with their respective OHS Inc. teams for four of those days. All proceeds from the bake sale competition are shared between OHS Inc. and the Travel Club.