Let's assign a "group roleplaying scenario" where the rest of the team can BLOW ME.

The BBQ Pit
21

I first developed a hatred for group projects in middle school. I went to a magnet middle school (gifted kids), and the theory was that we were all natural leaders (not really true) and that we had to learn how to work together. Sounds good on paper, but doesn’t translate into real life so well.

In 8th grade Earth Science, we were assigned into groups by personality types. The teacher tried to match up one hard-worker-anal retentive-leader type, one kind-of slacker, one artistic type, and one something else I can’t remember. Guess who ended up doing all of the work?

In high school, I quickly discovered that I actually did less work doing an entire project by myself than if I worked in a group, and I got a higher-quality project. So I would always request that the teacher let me work by myself, if possible. In 11th grade English, I got talked out of this, and roped into a group paper. Knowing that if I wasn’t the one to assemble the damn thing, the chances of it getting to class weren’t that great, everyone was supposed to send their work and bibliography to me, which I would then put together, make sure it flowed correctly, and make pretty. (On preview: Hopefully with fewer commas than in that last sentence.)

Here’s what happened: This was the most poorly written , disjointed paper I had ever read. I was embarrassed to put my name on the thing. So I sat down to heavily edit and at least make it sound like it made sense, and realized that there were some phrases in there that sounded vaguely familiar. Copy/paste a few pieces into Google, and low-and-behold, it was pretty damn similar to some stuff online. Not close enough that I could prove anything, though, and since I didn’t want to make waves (I was a bit shyer), I ended up rewriting the entire thing.

She also didn’t provide me with her part of the bibliography. I asked her about it, and she sent me a website with a lot of links on it. “I used some of these,” she told me, leaving me to go through them and figure out which ones had been used. I knew that if I left it to her, then it wouldn’t get done, and I was not risking my precious GPA.

Obviously, I should have gone to the teacher about that paper, or called the girl out on it, or done something other than keep quiet. If it happened now, I cetainly would. But the whole social situation in high school is tough. I wasn’t unpopular, but I wasn’t popular, either, and I didn’t want to risk alienating a lot of people.
Anyway, my point of those long-winded examples is that group projects are generally a bad idea. I hate being dependent on someone else.

22

Excellent rant, jurph, and powerful support for my belief that people shouldn’t be made to work in teams unless the desired end result is necessary to the continued successful existence of an organization; and is something that can only be accomplished by a team. Brain surgery qualifies; learning generic working-in-a-team skills does not.

One question: when the advanced degree is conferred by the school, and you’re using it to position yourself for the real-world benefits that will accrue to you in your career endeavors, how big a role is your GPA likely to play in getting yourself the sweetest package you can?

23

It is an excellent rant, and I enjoyed it, but I must add:

  1. In some fields, group collaborative work is required by the accreditation boards. If this is the case, your professor doesn’t have a choice.

  2. If the point is to prepare you for ‘real life’, then you should be forced to have a slacker on your team.

  3. A good professor wouldn’t neccessarily give everyone in the same group the same grade.

24

Great rant. Two small things:

  1. Why is “mouth breather” some sort of insult? :confused: (not just you, mind you).

  2. I have to admit that thoughts of a “group roleplaying scenario” where the rest of the team - of lovely co-eds- did “blow me” passed through parts of my hindbrain. :wink:

25

This is one of the great thread titles in SDMB history.

26

Wah.

Newsflash: educational programs don’t exist solely to cater to the way you think you’d like to be taught. Education is supposed to prepare you with skills that you need to enter the workforce in your chosen profession.

In a lot of jobs and in a lot of places, work gets done in teams. This is particularly true in engineering. And these places want to hire workers who have experience working in teams.

Sure, lazy team members, in school or on the job, are aggravating, so bitch away about them. But the fact that you’ve had particularly good experiences with team members in the workplace and/or particularly bad experiences with team members in school doesn’t change the reason those projects are asigned in the first place.

So you don’t like working on teams for class. Tough. Suck it up.

27

Go right ahead! And thanks for all the love, everyone.

You are a lucky son of a pirate wench – these things are all the rage (and may I re-emphasize the word “rage”, please?) among engineering professors now. I had team projects at least once each semester as an undergraduate in engineering, and a senior design project. In fact, Senior Design may have prejudiced me forever against group projects. I was drafted onto a team of three by a Team Leader who said “I can do Project D if Jurph is on my team, because he has an aptitude for that kind of design work.” Three of us were assigned to do a project intended for four people, and the Team ‘Leader’ graduated at the end of the first semester. The two of us remaining on the project worked our asses off to get an A-minus, but I missed pretty much all of the fun and relaxation that is supposed to go with being a 12-credit senior in his final semester.

My GPA won’t affect the follow-on benefits of having a degree, but it does affect how much tuition my employer is willing to pay up front. As long as I average better than a 3.5, my employer will front the tuition every semester and not request any compensation from me. In any semester where my semester average is below 3.5, I have to reimburse them for tuition, and they won’t front my tuition for the following semester (they will reimburse it if my average is above a 3.5, however). So far I’ve got a 4.0, and the longer I can keep that up, the harder it is for any one class to hurt me.

I agree totally! As the old light bulb joke goes, “…one to write the rant and four to bite my hairy ass.”

28

You mean your professor is (potentially) giving slackers the power to take money out of your pocket??!!??

ISTM that this is an issue that can legitimately be discussed with the professor. Preferably in a context that is divorced from the rest of the rant (so as not to make the professor defensive and hostile going into the negotiation, but you probably already knew that).

Good luck.

29

I use it as a noun where “slack-jawed” would be an appropriate adjective. People who walk around with their mouths open appear confused, unaware, and a little apathetic. Say the word “Durrrr” or “Uhhhh” condescendingly and check out the face you make – that’s what a mouth-breather looks like. Check out pictures of Butt-head (from Beavis & Butt-head) for another data point. It implies that they are so dumb that it shows.

Would you mind teaching one of my courses next semester? I believe I’ve finally found a professor who would put me on a team of hard-working, goal-oriented individuals… :smiley:

30

I am an Instructor, but only for the Government, sorry. :frowning:

I have been told my classes are very entertaining, but not that entertaining, I have to admit. :wink:

31

Jurph, I think you hit a good point on scheduling. In high school or in the workforce this wouldn’t be as much of an issue, but in university odds are good that your group has wildly diverging schedules. One student has all her classes on Tuesday and Thursday, another has his on Wednesday and Friday, a third works on weekends and a fourth is a 40-year-old night student with a day job and two kids. I’ve only had group work twice since I’ve been to university (well, three times if you count a partnered assignment, but with just two people it worked a lot better–a lot of planning happened over the phone) and both times we met as a group once to talk about it, and other than that it was all done seperately and thrown together at the last minute.

We did have one ‘group’ project in first year where one guy basically did everything, and the rest of us read what he had written. It was pretty obvious that this was his pet project, and the rest of us didn’t have much to do with it.

32

Aw man, Jurph, I can so relate. Being another anal-retentive-type with the ‘must get best possible mark on assignment or else I have failed it’ mindset, I hate hate hate hate group projects with a passion. It is a passion I have previously thought to be unparalleled, but I can see you feel this way too.

Let me tell you a story about a group project I worked on several years ago, in the last subject I had to complete to get my degree. The class was allowed to choose one partner & then two pairs were randomly combined to make final groups of 4. I guess this was supposed to make us feel like we had some control over our eventual assfucking. Anyway, I chose a girl, C, who I can work together with quite well, and as luck would have it, there was an odd number of pairs, and we were the odd ones out! “Woo”, I think, “this will be the best group project ever.”

Until my teacher drops the bomb that, “Oh, and P couldn’t be here today … I guess we’ll pair him up with Caiata and C, since they’re short a few people.”

Why couldn’t P be there that day? Well, because P is also getting a law degree from a different institution, and has three (yes, 3!) jobs. Bravo to P for being goal-oriented and all, but he hadn’t turned up to a single class during first semester except for the exam periods. Hell, C didn’t even know what P looked like! (In a course where only 24 are admitted per year and more than half of them drop out during first year, the group gets very tight-knit.) And P had an obvious priority for his law degree, and could not possibly care less whether he did well in the course we were in together, just as long as he passed.

P’s philosophy, in other words, was “P’s make degrees” - a common saying by members of the species Australianus Can’t-be-fuckedus.

Anyway, our first task was to write a Standard Operating Procedure for the investigation of a complex crime scene; ours was a clandestine drug laboratory, which was arguably THE most complex. And P didn’t write a single useable word - didn’t attend a single meeting. C and I compiled the entire SOP and were actually happy to do that - we knew it was good.

Then we discover that we have to work with this same group for the rest of the semester, when we go away, on a field trip, to investigate a mock major crime scene. Overnight. And camping. Well, P only barely makes it on time to the event and we’re seething already - a major crime scene (in our case an apparent suicide-by-hanging but it was actually murder) just can’t be done with two people. There aren’t enough hands! So he finally arrives and we give him the easiest and most straightforward task - diagramming the scene & keeping the evidence logs. You couldn’t find an easier task to perform at the crime scene. And he screws it up - doesn’t locate all the evidence properly on the diagram, can’t keep the time that we’ve collected the evidence straight, inaccurately describes the evidence, leaves randomly, etc. C and I are boiling at this point and we know we’re doomed - because once all the evidence is collected we can’t very well go back and measure where we think it might have been. We can’t fix his mistakes!

And I know that in the real world you have to work with others in a crime scene (well, not me - I’m a chemist now), but in the real world the others should be able to draw a motherfucking diagram without having their precious little hands held. Grr.

Anyway, now we have to go on to a mock court, where my testimony will be drastically affected by P’s inability to read a watch. We get shredded. At least we handled ourselves professionally, but I know if it had been a real court we probably wouldn’t be working in Forensics after that performance…

I actually got top marks in the class while P nearly failed, because our teacher noticed that C and I were hampered drastically by P’s presence. So that part of it was OK.

Fast-forward to next year. I am now teaching classes in the degree I have just completed, and P is still a student in one of those classes. I give an assignment - research the methods used to produce illicit drugs and how forensic chemists analyse them in the field/in the lab.

P submits …

… my portion of the Clandestine Drug Laboratory Standard Operating Procedure from our group project the previous semester!!!

And because it was a group project and he was a part of that group, the administration at my building rule that it isn’t plagiarism “because P can’t plagiarise himself”. I had to mark it - MY OWN WORK - to give him a grade.

Grr … Oh man I hate group projects. More trouble than they’re worth.

Fellow teachers, I implore you - if you must assign a group project, please, please allow students to give feedback to you on the performance & commitment of the other team members. I know it’s not your job to mediate petty squabbles between your students, but seriously, if one student isn’t pulling his/her weight, the others will let you know, and be eternally grateful if that slacker doesn’t get the same mark as they get.

In the real employment world when you work in a team the management has the authority to do something about it if one team member isn’t contributing, and the other employees have the ability to come to their manager with their complaints, and if those complaints are well-documented, then something will be done. If you teachers are assigning us these group projects to prepare us for the real world, then let us work the same way.

33

Hear, hear, Jurph! I hated group work in school and still don’t care for it. I’m a damn good student and a damn hard worker. Why should I have to coddle, cajole, and carry along incompetent and apathetic group members in order to get a decent grade?

34

My favorite episode of “Monster House” was the one where the build team was made up entirely of people who had been kicked off of, or had stomped away from, the teams in earlier episodes, for various manifestations of inability to work with others or at all. Somehow they all came to the realization of how they themselves had been the problem earlier, worked it out, got it together, and got the job done.

Your profs should have done the same - put all the slackers in a single team. It would have been more educational to all of them.

That is not quite the same as a hockey coach putting all the puckhogs on the same line, that’s a different problem, but the same solution works there too.

35

Irony, she bites like a bear trap. The evening after I posted this rant, I was placed on my team for the semester. We have no slackers, and we have at least one person who is more passionate/driven/obsessive/psychotic about getting good grades on group work than I am. I have volunteered for a typically large chunk of the work, but it doesn’t appear that we have a single slacker – the group is comprised of people who are usually forced to become the group leaders. :smack: “Puckhogs” indeed…

36

I can vouch for at least one professor I had…when our entire team (minus the slacker) sat down and told him the issues we were having with said slacker (no meeting attendence, no research, no NOTHING), he promptly removed him from our team…

…and made him perform the whole project himself, as his own team.

Of course, we were one person short, but not that he would have made a difference anyway. We did enjoy watching him choke when it was his turn to present.

37

Holy fuck, that was great. “Assmaggot”…I love that. I think I’m gonna cry…

38

God, that was great. I totally agree with you. I might be a mite flaky in my social life, but when it comes to the academic. . .well, I do it, and I get it done right. I hate group projects because there’s always that one guy/girl. You know the one, obviously, because you wrote a such a great rant about him/her.

I had the best experience in high school with this. I was a member of the gifted academy, which basically meant that my classmates and I were supposed to be the best of the best. The first semester, we had to give presentations about specific topics in Eastern culture. My randomly-assigned partner and I. . .well. . .let’s just say that it was an uneven balance. I came up with the concepts, the props. . .I did the majority of the script. . .I did all the rest of the writing. . .and there was something else. . .it’s on the tip of my tongue. . .

. . .oh, yeah. I was the one to actually show up the day of the presentation!

So, here I am. . .fortunately, since I did most of the preparation, I had all the materials with me. I pulled a random person from the class to be my partner for the presentation. I believe that my partner had to do the presentation privately after she came back, with the materials that I’d provided. Unfortunately for her, it was fairly obvious to the teacher who’d done most of the writing.

I got an A. She got a C. I mean, I feel bad for her, but. . .c’mon? Unless you’re deathly ill, you go to school if you have a presentation first freakin’ hour. That being said, I think it was a one-time screw-up for her, as she was generally okay the rest of the time.

39

To the “Keeper(s) of Posts Worth Keeping” I nominate this thread, and specifically its OP, as a candidate for “Straight Dope Classic.”

Any seconds?

40

+1