While discussing my book project with my group members in class, I overheard a classmate in another group having a tearful conversation to the professor. It seems that half of her group of four spontaneously decided to drop the class :eek: leaving her and her remaining partner high and dry.
I don’t care if people want to drop the class in the middle of the semester, but if you’re in a group, geez at least give some advance warning or something! :mad: Or, if you’re not even sure you’re going to stay in the class, inform the professor prior to starting a group project, or simply group up with a bunch of other flakes :rolleyes:
Not sure yet. I don’t know if it would be too nosy to find out though…
If it were early in the project, it would just be simple enough to assimilate the orphaned group members into existing groups, but it sounded like there was work done already. I’m guessing the existing group members already did their respective Step 1 and Step 2, and the other people were supposed to do Step 3 and 4. They may not have time to finish the rest of it with only 2 people (we have SIX people in our group, yet its hell in a handbasket getting everybody organized and on-task )
I hope things work out for them, though. It seems every group is having some issues with people.
This sort of thing is yet another reason why I despise group work in general. Thankfully, I haven’t gotten too terribly screwed in my college workgroups, but back in high school…hoo boy. Inevitably, I’d be placed in a group consisting of three other people: a ditzy overachiever girl, a useless lazy guy, and a Clueless Leader (usually a guy, sometimes a girl, but always the “take-charge” type and never with any idea what to do). The work itself always went something like this.
Clueless Leader: Okay, let’s read the problem. (Reads problem aloud.) Now, I think we need to go through the possible methods of solving it. We could use Useless Method A…
Ditz: Yeah! Roland: That won’t work. We need to use Method X.
CL: …or we could try Useless Method B; that was what we used on the homework last night… Roland That won’t work either. We need to use Method X.
CL: …I think that might be the way to go. Roland: (ignores group and beings working on problem.)
Ditz: Waaah! I don’t understand it!
CL: Ok, I’ll explain it to you. Lazy Guy, you work on the problem in the meantime.
Lazy Guy: Whatever. Roland: The answer is four.
CL: …and that’s how Useless Method B works, Ditz.
Ditz: I think I’ve got it…
CL: Ok, now that didn’t work, so we should move on to Useless Method C.
Ditz: Waaah! I don’t understand it! Roland: The answer is four.
Lazy Guy: (writes down “four”.)
CL: Ok, this is how it works; Lazy Guy and Roland, you might want to listen… Roland: (goes to sleep.)
Ah, memories…let’s just say I’ve done my fair share of “all the work”. The fun was doubled when the group was graded on the contributions of the individual members, so that I had to spend more time teaching everybody what they “did” than I took actually solving the problem. I suspect that the teachers all know this goes on, and design groups like this on purpose. It’s the only reason I can come up with to explain how the smart people always get evenly distrubuted.
Do I have a point? I think so. Yeah, here it is: I hate group work. That is all.
I’m opposed to group projects in principle. It’s grossly unfair for an individual’s grade to be dependent upon the performance (or lack thereof) of others. I suspect that assigning group projects is just laziness on the part of the instructor, who doesn’t want to grade any more projects than she has to.
We do group presentations in my Communications class. Fortunately, I have a good, sharp group and we work well together. Another group in the class had a member quit the day before the presentation – having not done a darn thing, of course. It was painful to watch them, and we all felt bad for them. We can only hope the instructor went easy on them, but knowing this instructor, she probably didn’t.
it’s rather unfair to assume that group projects are set simply to save the instuctor (or whoever) some work. They can actually be far harder to mark, then there’s the time spent sorting out squabbles and legitimate complaints.
They are a means of teaching other skills such as communication, time management, people management etc which are useful skills in the work place. Because, lets face it, most people will need to work as part as a team at some point. If they instructor hasn’t devised a marking scheme that will fairly reflect each student’s contribution, and made allowances for drop outs or non-contributing members, then that is lazy.
Why are students even allowed to drop a class so late in the semester?
At my undergrad university, the deadline for dropping courses was four weeks after semester started. After that, you either went through with the course, or took a grade of F.
If you can’t work out after a month whether or not you want to be in the class, perhaps you’re not bright enough to be at university in the first place.
That’s the crazy thing about it- people will drop classes on a whim even though they know full well they will get an F. What I really loathe is when they made a commitment to a group, and just ditch them. The only reason I can imagine that they do it is because they are cowards- if they aren’t telling anybody anything, then chances are they have a lame reason for dropping the class, and by just disappearing they avoid any awkward confrontations. I understand some people drop because of emergencies/things beyond their control, but these people typically let all parties involved know about the situation.
Incubus, be pro-active! Tell the professor that you’re willing to join this other group to help even things out. I’m guessing that the remaining two are the only people who did any work, so you’ll have a group of three do-bees, and you’ll have dumped your load of don’t-bees by the wayside.
I could start a Pit thread on flakey groupmates, oh boy. Especially groupmates who were assigned to you. Even if the prof provides for some sort of slacker-control in which the group submits a report on who contributed what, it still doesn’t change the fact that in order to ensure myself a decent grade in the class I’ll have to do by myself a workload that was meant to be shared by five-plus people.
I don’t have any inherent problem with working with others in a project, but in Gen Ed classes you’re so likely to be stuck with people who just don’t give half a fuck about the class - they want their C- and not a point more. They’ll gladly sit back and allow me to write scenes, do research, put hours of my own time into their grade.
May each of my groupmates’ colons explode during Thanksgiving dinner, and rain their contents down upon the heads of their relatives.
You know, I don’t really think it’s the students’ responsibility. We’re allowed to drop with no grade until half-way through the semester. If professors assign group projects, they need to come up with a method to ensure that no one gets left high and dry like that. I despise group projects; they’re always a ridiculous waste of time. And generally they involve presentations, which means day after boring day of watching one group after another stumble their way through a power-point. I hate them because I never learn a goddamn thing from a group project.
Please. One of my professors is assigning us group work just to get out of lecturing. She’s a rotten lecturer anyhow, and her class is utterly worthless. I assume she’s more into her research than into teaching, because seh doesn’t actually bother to teach us a goddamn thing. In some cases, it’s definitely a way to get out of doing real work.
Wah. Hate to be the one to break it to you, but your professional career will be dependent in part on the performance, or lack thereof, of the other people in your department or company. Gotta get the gizmo designed or the code written by the first of the year, and if you don’t, you all look bad, the VP isn’t gonna be impressed if you can identify the slackers in the department.
Incidentally, while I can’t speak for all disciplines, in engineering, students must demonstrate the ability to work in teams in order for the engineering program to receive accreditation. It ain’t optional. Which is why multiple classes have team assignments.
I spent a couple semesters, while a grad student, as part of the teaching staff for the ME senior capstone design course – a course which is essentially 100% group project. I enjoyed it immensely actually, but it sure wasn’t all that easy, beacuse every single project had different problems, and different crisis points, and different team dynamic issues. We had multiple interim reports, and final reports that, with appendices, might run 250-300 pages. And they all needed to be graded consistently.
And, just for reference, we did assign people to teams so that every team had the same mix of academic achievement. So the smarter you were, the more likely you’d wind up with dimmer people on the team. In principle, everyone on the team brings some skill to the table, but in practice, there were some slackers. Who were graded accordingly.
And those coworkers will also quit or fall apart at unexpected moments. And your “professor” will change the requirements of your project periodically, sometimes without telling you.
School sucks.
Work sucks and lasts a *lot * longer.
I hope your project goes well, Incubus. Don’t worry too much about the other group. It sounds like you’ve got trouble enough.
Yeah, I had a guy drop out halfway through the most unbelievably complex and involved project of my entire university career. Which I then had to do myself.
I don’t know whether I was mad that he dropped out, or relieved he didn’t do it after we had developed a corpus of work which he would then take with him. I much prefer working alone, which is why I am now a freelancer, but CHRIST that project was stressful.
I remember a while back somebody–maybe Athena–posted a rather lengthy description of what a software development class would look like if it were set up to model the real world. It’d be a nice to have a link to it here, because it pretty conclusively demonstrates just how easy you have it in college.
Curt Smith. He and Roland Orzabal (the real one) formed Tears For Fears together. During the early years, Curt was the public face of the band, largely because Roland was not exactly your most attractive teenager. High Cheese was, by way of being a wiseass, pointing out that even musical geniuses benefit from working together once in a while.
I can’t believe you actually used the phrase “don’t-bees”. I admire your temerity, spunk, and stick-to-it-iveness. Such cheery, rosy attitudes do not belong in the Pit, however… so I’m going to say this next bit, because it’s appropriate for the Pit, but you and I will know it’s code for a compliment and chuck on the shoulder: FUCK.
Let me tell you a story about my senior design project. We were given our choice of ten interesting problems to solve. Some problems were easier than others, and so attracted more attention, but everyone wrote down their three top choices for a project, and a short list of people they would like to work with (as well as one bullet veto for a person they would not like to work with). For the rest of the year, that’s your team.
I had listed two really cool projects and one marginally cool project. I honestly forget what the first two were now, so you know where this is going. The third one was a modification to a piece of mobility equipment for people with multiple sclerosis - amazingly rewarding stuff, but not a problem I had a good approach for. I thought it’d be cool, and I knew a guy in our class who had MS, so I figured he was a shoo-in for that project, but I didn’t really want to work that one. He and I had done several classes’ homework sets together, and we had talked about the projects outside of class, and I had expressed interest in the others, hoping that he’d understand that I didn’t really have a good solution in mind for the third project and wouldn’t really be much of an asset.
Nonetheless, some pre-arranging of teams took place, and when the Big Day came that September, I was on his team with another student, Chrissy, who we both knew was sharp as a tack. Turns out he had written me in as his first pick for a teammate, with the addendum, “I’m not sure I can accomplish this project without Jurph on my team.” The prof told me about this later, and I was touched, but a little bothered that he had disregarded my preference on the matter, especially given what came next.
Our project almost immediately became recognized as the “black hole” – our solution required an order of magnitude more parts and assembly than any other, and we had roughly the same budget. With the three of us, we were making headway on most of the major problems that came up and learning to divide the labor. We had worked pretty well as a team for four months, and then in December, he graduated. A semester early. Without completing Senior Design.
So, assigned to the hardest project in the class, with (Thank God!) a do-bee for a teammate, we took the 50% manpower reduction in stride and worked ourselves ragged during our last semester in college, while our fearless leader went and took a job on the outside and they paid his salary and his Master’s tuition, and our classmates attended “parties” on Thursday and Friday nights. And Saturday nights. And occasionally Monday nights.
A few good things to come out of that:
I learned exactly how hard I can work for exactly how long - the hallucinations are a big hint.
I designed a mechanism that the staff machinist praised as “fucking brilliant.” It wasn’t precisely a spoke-passer, but it was close.
The project met all of its specifications except budget, and a follow-on team the next year refined the design. I believe something derived from my design is in use today, helping people with MS live easier lives.
For someone to drop a class, and therefore get an F, either means that a) the person will soon be failing out of school because this is the kind of thing they do or b) they are depressed/having a father die/ill.
I just can’t muster up a bunch of sympathy for you.
