I don’t mind naming it, though I’m not sure most people would recognize it even so; Wake Forest University. Last year (I haven’t looked at this years), I believe we were ranked in the 30-40 range over all for the US. I believe they may have slipped out of the top 40 this year though. Globally, I think the ranking was in the 70-80 range by both the Financial Times and The Economist. The working professional program is ranked in the top 25 for that type of program by Business Week. So we aren’t ‘top tier’, but it isn’t Strayer University either.
I considered UNC, and had the scores to get in, but they didn’t have an evening/working professionals program and the drive was too far. Wake was convenient, ranked well enough that I felt it would be a good value, and far better than other programs within driving distance of my home.
What kind of grade is he going to get in this class from not being involved in the work? Is he handing in assignments by himself? If he isn’t a hard working genius, your description makes it sound like he is on his way to flunking the class.
It is an excellent honor system that prevents people not doing the work from getting credit, by the way.
His team didn’t abandon him until halfway through the last class of this semester. He’ll probably be able to manage. It is future semesters where the lack of the team is going to require an enormous effort to keep up his grades. The school requires a minimum GPA of 5 out of 9 to remain in the program.
As for the honor system and preventing people not doing work from getting credit, it can’t stop collusion, of course. But if the school assigned him to a team, and the team turned in a project w/o his name on him after excluding him from the process, the honor code would prevent the prof from giving Paul any credit for that assignment. I was simply pointing out the school can’t force a team to take him in.
This isn’t training for the real world–in the real world, you’d have no choice about working with the asshole, and then he’d take the credit for the whole project.
This is a last-ditch attempt to break this sort of behavior before it gets into the real world, where there’s no way to stop it in a corporate environment because of the stupid games you have to play every day when you work in an office job.
(Side note: I currently avoid 90% of that even though I work for a large global company because of the incredible level of awesome exemplified by my immediate coworkers, but some of my friends aren’t so lucky, and I’ve had much worse jobs in the past.)
I’ve always wondered if a top tier MBA program was filled with “Pauls” or if he was more of the exception.
Unrelated, but I came across this “pay scale over time” chart on businessweek.com. Shot From Guns - one of my reasons for getting an MBA was to have more flexibility to work with people who are more on the awesome side. What I’ve found is that having an MBA really changes your perspective on how companies work. You tend to think strategically and professionally compared to more junior “office drones” who tend to get all bent out of shape over minutae and whatnot.
When I got my MBA several teams were vying for my membership (I’m an engineer; they just wanted someone to do the math ). Seriously; there were muffins involved. However, we didn’t really have any dead weight in my program, so there was only the normal team drama involved.
Back in getting my Engineering degree, though, there were definitely some anchors in our class. It was critical getting in with a good group on each design project, and we had to have a different team on each project. I unfortunately had an interview when they choose up the last teams, and when I checked with the professor learned that only the anchors were left over as a team.
He, knowing the situation, allowed me to work on my own. I basically did quadruple the work and still turned in a far better design than the anchor team did. Totally worth it to me – I’d’ve ended up doing the same, with them, but also having to deal with the aggravation of their incompetence. And they’d’ve tried to glom on to my work.
Long story short, all the Pauls on that team learned nothing by being stuck together. Their design sucked, and they were just as irritating as before. (they also graduated, so wasn’t fixed before the “real world”.)
Wow. That’s a messed up program. It is absolutely unfair to allow other students to effectively kick out another student from a program. A student has invested time and money into his education and for what? Oh, the other students don’t like you? Sorry, you’ve wasted your time and money. Goodbye.
Paul’s tuition has bought him the right to register for classes. If he wants to pass his classes, then he needs to meet the requirements for each them, one of which is not alienating his fellow students to the point where they refuse to work with him. If he can’t do that, he doesn’t pass.
Students should not have the power to do that to him. It’s a messed up system. If his creepiness is really that bad then someone should file a harassment complaint with the school and get him kicked out via a tangible and well documented process. Can’t succeed that way? Then he’s not sufficiently ‘creepy.’
The rule to allow students to kick out a member was probably made so that students could kick out someone who wasn’t doing the work, not because of some personal conflict.
Same here - my own “MBA for Aviation Professionals” program was entirely online, with a bunch of pilots who all wanted the engineer with a steady schedule (me) for a teammate. Not a problem, though, the “cohort” was pretty homogeneous professionally, and well-focused. Well, there was one guy with an organization problem, but we all liked him, knew and admired his personal story, knew he was working harder than any of us, and we helped him along.
The only drama was between all of us as a group and, shall we say, a few less-than-diligent instructors and an administrator who was simply fascinated with our team interpersonal dynamics and not at all with actual course content. Only a credible threat of mass withdrawal got the school to take it seriously (after an MBA-style “we hire only the finest professionals” etc. bullshit letter) and make some changes.
I was thinking more of an episode of “Monster House” where the build team was made entirely of people who had been kicked off of earlier episodes for various forms of severe a-holishness. Incredibly, there actually were some Learning Moments and they did get the project done.
Heh. I hope he isn’t Paul (which is obviously a fake name). Wake has, presently, several different programs with almost 500 students. There’s full-time and the various working professional programs (two classes of two evenin, and two friday-saturday programs). My class graduates Aug 2010.
An MBA program isn’t kindergarten where “everybody’s a winner!” It’s a competitive environment designed to train people for the real business world.
And you’re pretty naive if you think that Paul’s creepy behavior (as described) is something that would be part of a legitimate harassment complaint. What are you going to do? Go running to HR every time someone calls you a nerd?
Besides, on further reflection, I realized something–we’ve discussed firing people and getting them off of teams at work. We all know that you often can’t get rid of people, and it is good training to learn to work with them.
But once Paul got kicked off his first team, it was no longer a question of firing. It became a question of hiring.
If you were a hiring manager in a real company, would you hire someone that you knew made offensive statements and couldn’t get along with others and showed no willingness to change and improve? Would somebody like msmith invite him to be part of a group that was doing a prestigious project? Of course not. So why would the other teams “hire” him? Not only would having him on their teams hold them back, but it would also demonstrate a lack of common sense with regard to the hiring process.
). Seriously; there were muffins involved. However, we didn’t really have any dead weight in my program, so there was only the normal team drama involved.