This is why I hate group assignments

[BookstoreEscapee]

I've actually heard of scenarios on NotAlwaysLearning (which may need to be taken with a grain of salt) where the teacher has actually picked up on who wasn't doing the work and marked each group member individually.

There was one recently where the submitter was the one doing all the work and decided she could afford an F on one assignment...her partner got a surprise when they got their grades.

[fireheart]

There was one recently where the submitter was the one doing all the work and decided she could afford an F on one assignment...her partner got a surprise when they got their grades.

Yeah I saw that, except that wasn't the one I was referring to. In the story I was thinking of, one girl in a group of guys, the same thing happened (the girl was in charge). The girl got her own back though by picking the most girlish folder that she owned to submit the assignment in.
The group were called up, the teacher asked if it had been the group's idea to submit it in a girly pastel glittery folder. The slackers just mumbled an answer.
End result: girl gets an A, everyone else flunks.

[Sapphire Silk]

The first was a presentation to the class covering a concept we'd previously been lectured on. Because I couldn't get the others in my group to ever respond to my emails for help, I ended up creating the entire power point presentation. Then, the day of, we split it up and each talked about a section of the presentation. I had also written up the talking points to go with each slide. I ended up do most of the talking as well because my other group members didn't feel comfortable talking in front of the rest of the class.

Your group mates are lazy SHITS. No if ands or buts. They LET you do all the work and reaped the rewards.

I don't understand why they can't do what they are supposed to do for this. Everyone in the program has had to pass two English writing courses with at least a B. Makes me wonder what kind of work the profs of those classes were handing out B's for.

I've messaged the professor about the situation. I had already filled her in on what happened with the presentation. I emailed the group members and asked the two to redo their parts. The paper is due at 11:59 pm on 7/21. If they don't get them to me by 8 am tomorrow, I'm just going to have to turn in what the one girl and I did that is actually usable. Fortunately, we both wrote about 2-1/2 pages of material, so we'll still be within the page requirements, we'll just not have two of our subsections covered. What they don't seem to understand is that if they don't take this seriously, they could be kicked out of the program!

The best indicator of future behavior is past behavior. You have sent the message to these girls that you are willing to do their work for them. They will continue to take advantage of you until you make them stop.
If this had been an individual paper, I'd have had it all wrapped up and turned in days ago.

Honestly, if they can't take their classes seriously, then I don't want them to stay in the program because I don't want to have to work with nurses that don't have any work ethic.

I wouldn't, either.

Fortunately, the professor is awesome. I've kept her in the loop about what's going on. She wants me to let her know exactly who did what for the paper and they'll be graded on what they did or didn't do, not on the overall paper. So, that's good, but the entire situation is extremely frustrating. Our program is incredibly difficult to get into (over 400 people applied for 80 slots), so you'd think the people in it would be a little more motivated.

You'd think. We have the same kind of thing in my program. My students do peer reviews; if you get a bad peer review, you are likely to lose points on your project.

One student saw her group get an A while she got a C as a result, because she didn't do her part.

[hinakiba777]

I have found that I usually end up in groups with competent people who are willing to do their work, so everything turns out quite well. Or we all just divide and conquer the assignment, and again pull out the A-. There was one instance where I had a really bad group work experience. Basically, we were assigned groups and required to meet with the TA twice during the semester to run over the assignment. The group decided to split in half and each see him once instead of going as a group. So the first half of the group went to the first meeting, told us what we had to do, we split it up into sections, and then radio silence. Then the second half of the group, the part I was in, went to see the TA. The TA informed us that not only were we supposed to meet him as a whole group, but that the first half had given us the WRONG information and we would have to redo the assignment. Now this wasn't a big deal for the rest of the group, but I had already done all of my research and stuff. So the next day in class we explained the mistake, re divided the work, and Radio Silence. We never discussed anything. The decision ended up being that everyone would just do their own slides etc, someone would make sure they LOOKED the same, and we would just present. We never talked to each other. I luckily got to present first in my group, and then got to sit back and laugh internally as my group just repeated the same information. Sadly, "working as a group" was only a tiny part of the peer evaluations, and everyone actually did really well on their section. It's just that no one ever discussed what they were doing with the others.

In my "Math for Elementary School Teachers" course the professor had group tests during tutorial period. So we would have class where he lectured and gave us practice questions, then homework where we would gain better understanding, then, later in the week, tutorial period with the group tests. Now the whole purpose of the group tests was to use your groups knowledge to help you figure out things you may not have understood from the homework, and then work together on the tests. Ideally, you would learn from your groups and then be able to apply that knowledge when you studied later. The only problem is that the majority of my class both times I took the course were Chinese International students, who ALWAYS talked in Mandarin. So they would work out the problems with each other, and then either just tell me the answer, or leave me out. The first time i took the class, I just had to ask them to talk to me in English, which worked out most of the time, but I had to do it constantly. The second time, the two members of my group just worked together, and if i got stuck would ask if I had done the homework. I really feel like it would be a HELPFUL way to learn, if only my classmates respected the rules of the class and talked in English during group work. (Technically, they are only supposed to talk English in class at all times so the professor understands them, but personally I only care when we are working as a group.)

[wolfie]

All you can do is maybe lower their grade if there's a group self-grading system in place.

We have the same kind of thing in my program. My students do peer reviews; if you get a bad peer review, you are likely to lose points on your project.

Of course, you still have to deal with the pathological case - the group consists of a "clique" of lazy slackers who are friends with each other, and one hard-working "outsider". "Outsider" does all the work, and at peer review time, the "clique" members all agree that THEY did the work and OUTSIDER was slacking. End result: person who did the work gets a bad grade, lazy bums get good grades.

[Pixilated]

I remember being in a group like this when I was taking the PR program ... I was much older than the other students, and not snazzily dressed, and unfortunately this group had been taken over by possibly the most pretentious bitch in the class. It didn't take long before I went to the teacher and explained that I was being left completely out of the loop in terms of group meetings and assignments -- just in case Ms Bitch reported that I hadn't done anything.

[Racket_Man]

I hated one group project back in college. It was a year long (2 semester) programming/IT class for systems analysis and design. the first half was learning to do a proper systems need and data analysis. Then in the second half we got a real world project to do from the ground up and build a real world system for an actual company.

Since I was the programming nerd I took most of the "guts" and behind the scenes stuff -- ya know the nuts and bolts modules that make up a system. I let the others design the layouts, user interfaces, data needs, database design and I incorporated/programmed their design.

there were a LOT of times that I had to pull teeth just to get them to get me the required items/designs.

a couple of times, in a sleep deprived state I sort of bitterly complained to the professor about said delays. I guess he did have some conversations with my fellow group members because things got a little more on track after that.

[Chromatix]

I had a group project gone bad at the end of my first-year university course. Picture the scene:

One group member is a bit average in coding skill, but it turns out he can write us a simple parser and database, things I hadn't really looked into at the time, so he had a niche carved out. He knuckles down and produces usable work in good time.

Another group member freely admits he hasn't a clue about coding, but that's okay because we need someone to do testing and documentation. IT managed to screw up the official development environment on the lab workstations, so I log him in to my 486 from a lab terminal so that he can do his bit. The 486 is slow as molasses, but it works well enough and we get our documentation.

I get to write the central logic which ties the two other coding modules together, as well as the overall project report (as a sort of cover letter to the test report and documentation) - the latter because I keep a posse of Macs and can therefore make the documents pretty. Bear in mind that this was in the days when M$ Word wasn't nearly as good at such things as even the most common and basic Mac software, so this was a big point in favour. For this reason, the two other coders and the testing guy are supposed to send their work to me for integration.

Which leads me to the fourth and final member of the group. He was meant to do the graphics module, by far the most visible part of the completed project. But after the initial meeting where we agreed on our respective areas of responsibility, he completely disappeared off the radar. Initially, we thought he just wasn't working as quickly as we were, so we polished our code a bit more. I whipped up my own version of the graphics module so that we could test the remaining code more thoroughly.

But eventually it became clear that it would be too risky to rely on an eventual revelation, so my "temporary" graphics module became the official one - on the understanding that if a miracle happened and the long gestation period was merely a sign of ultimate greatness (yeah right), it could easily be swapped out again. Since additional features beyond the basic spec were encouraged, we added a few obvious ones and handed it over to our tame racing... er, tester.

Meanwhile I managed to work out how to run it on my PowerBooks, which were much faster than the 486, and even somewhat faster than the workstations we were meant to be using (which were, incidentally, still not fixed).

One *day* before we were supposed to present the finished project to the class in the lab, an e-mail finally arrived in my inbox with a graphics module attached. It was instantly obvious that it had never even attempted to pass through the compiler. After correcting the myriad basic mistakes - it was in considerably worse condition than the first version I had received from the other coder - it still implemented only the most basic features, which we had long since surpassed, and didn't include any handling for the quirks involved in running it on a Mac.

So we duly presented the project using my version of the graphics module, and documented the heck out of the circumstances in my report. With the malfunctioning workstations, my PowerBooks (one old, one new) were pressed into service not only to present our version of the project, but several other groups' as well - they had been working on it with their desktop Windows machines, which they couldn't bring into the lab with them. Of course, I had to point out that several common quirks were the result of writing for one platform and running it on another - this was the infamous "write once, debug everywhere" language that you might have heard of.

The professor assured us in advance that with the appropriate documentation, adjustment would be made for the lack of participation of the fourth group member. I never saw the actual grades, but it seems plausible that this was actually done. Meanwhile, our efforts got us the runner-up position for the improvements we had implemented - possibly also influenced by the lab assistants' surprise at seeing it working on a Mac! I still have the T-shirt somewhere...

[EricKei]

On the "firing" a partner thing -- Most of the group projects I did were pre-high school, so dumping a useless member was not an option -- After all, these things were meant to "teach us how to work together" -- in other words, if 3 out of 4 members felt that the other guys was a slacker, it was THEIR fault for not being able to work as a team and inspire him to greatness x.x

[wolfie]

Of course, I had to point out that several common quirks were the result of writing for one platform and running it on another - this was the infamous "write once, debug everywhere" language that you might have heard of.

Modula-2, by any chance? That one was supposed to be a cross-platform language, but proved the adage "There are 2 kinds of programming languages - Wirth-less and worthless".

[Chromatix]

Not Modula-2 - I think that might have been a bit earlier.

Try Java. The workstations broke because they were trying out a beta version of Java 1.2 (aka the first version of "Java 2") which IMHO should never have passed alpha since it was so easy to find bugs in it - in all seriousness, every single group ran into the same problems, unless they were using a Windows laptop to demo the project, or had debugged it on the workstations in advance.

The Mac-specific quirks were, IIRC, twofold. The most visible once running was a difference in the layout algorithm for AWT widgets, which was easy enough to work around *if* you observed it first. However, the Windows and UNIX versions of the JVM were both about the same in that respect. The other quirk was that the Mac wouldn't run a .jar archive or even a .class directly - it had to be wrapped up in a binary that knew how to call the JVM into existence to run it. That problem went away when MacOS X arrived.

[hinakiba777]

in other words, if 3 out of 4 members felt that the other guys was a slacker, it was THEIR fault for not being able to work as a team and inspire him to greatness x.x

UGH. I have had that speech made to me before. Then I got into the habit (only in middle school and high school) of rear guarding the project. I would stay just behind our slowest worker in terms of progress. This was a tactic I would outline beforehand. So if someone was slacking, my productivity automatically dropped. So then the slacker would notice we weren't forging on without them, and they would catch up. This worked about 8/10 times. The other 20% of the time i ended up having to do MASSIVE last minute work to cover myself. Which sucked, and was pretty much my own fault for trying such a risky tactic.