I am curious. What makes you think that you made a choice based purely on logic?
Since wanting things to be simple and plesant is quite emotional approach to things. Even if it is easy to mask it as rational.
(but I realise that thing are not that simple)
When I find myself in this kind of situations I just try to do my best in finnishing a task. I find this approach to be the one that has the best ratio of efficiency and getting out of there. But when it comes to college this highly depends on what you are studing in the first place.
Well, I said that it was a logical choice because I based it purely on efficiency towards attaining an end-goal and not on values or personal like/dislike. If I had wanted it to be "pleasant and nice," I certainly wouldn't have chosen the class with the prof that I have regular personality conflicts with. I figured that the losses incurred by the bad feelings I get when around that prof (because he's an asshole) were far outweighed by the benefits that the class's schedule and reading list would afford.
The end-goal I'm talking about is professional advancement. The most efficient route to achieving this goal is to take seminars in my area of study (in my subfield) and use them to produce conference-ready or publication-ready articles, which all help you to get a job once you're ABD or you've got the PhD in hand. In this case, I had already chosen the classes that would be important to my area of study, so this last class would in any case be a class that is extra/not important to my area. In terms of value to my area, then, all were equal.
So knowing that the value of all of these classes to choose from were equal (in terms of importance to my area of study), I had to move to different criteria to make my decision. I figured that if this class was going to be unimportant no matter what, that I should probably pick the one that (1) fits better with my schedule, and (2) has the least amount of reading.
The reason for (1) is that I will be able to perform best in a class that fits better with my schedule. I could have taken a class that I liked better, but that fell on a day that I had two other classes, and this would have severely hampered my ability to perform well in the class (that's three 3 hour seminars, so 9 hours at school in one day, plus my two hours of teaching). And I didn't want my grade in an unimportant class to tarnish my record, lowering my chances for employment after graduation. So I chose the class that fit better with my schedule.
The reason for (2) is that the less time spent reading for an unimportant class, the more time I would have to spend on the important ones without sacrificing my grade in the unimportant class (which would be bad for the aforementioned reasons).
I guess I didn't mean that it was a "purely logical" decision, but that it was one made without taking my
personal values or feelings into account. Of course, it was ultimately based around values (namely, the value placed in professional advancement), but I'm not sure that means it isn't logical.