What is your opinion of taking a course where you are in a group of three and

[graywarrior]

your entire semester grades depend on what you do as a group.

What do you do when the other two people in your group do nothing all semester and when you give your final presentation, it sucks because of that?

How do you handle that when you already talked to the professor 3 or 4 times and are told "tough shit" more of less.

Then what do you think of the professor having the class vote on the best presentation when it is clear she is rooting for the group whose members have been in another of her classes?


This is not my issue, however, I've been listening to this all semester.

[blueamy66]

1. Sounds like the Univ of Phx....

I would never attend a school that graded groups.

Tell your friend to get out now. Doesn't sound like there is any other answer.

[graywarrior]

4. It's such a total rip off when you pay tuition and then have to rely on slackers for a good grade

The course description said it would teach you to write your own business plan but the students were then put into groups and told to design an imaginary business. Then they were given this piece of crap software designed by someone at the school that didn't cooperate with Microsoft.

Now this person has to memorize terminology that has several different meanings for a 50 question test on Tuesday (in addition to memorizing 3 parts for his acting class...lol). His head explodes every day!

[EndersDame]

2. I would step up and work three times as hard

I have been put in groups in high school where everyone relied on me for the work and grade. I tried do nothing as well but suffered because of it

[graywarrior]

5. He did.

He did all the homework and get this, another guy passed it in as his own. LOL. They did the presentation last night and it sucked because the other two guys had no idea what they were toaking about as none of the work was theirs.

[blueraven95]

3. I would take that to the professor's department chair

and if that doesn't work, keep going up the chain.

Make sure it's all documented, though. That's really important.


I dealt with a similar situation when I was in undergrad - eventually managed to get the problem person fired (but he wasn't tenured, obviously).

[graywarrior]

7. The course description does not match the assignments that were given in class

They had to give a PowerPoint presentation which the instructor told them about 3 weeks ago. Never is that mentioned in the course syllabus or catalog description.

[blueraven95]

17. that alone is not enough to make a case

but it's good backup evidence to bring up.

[BuelahWitch]

9. I second this

Kick it upstairs. It's bullshit if you get a lousy grade because your "partners" sloughed off all semester.

[MrCoffee]

6. I was in a group of three where one member thought plagairism was perfectly fine

That was an absolute nightmare to resolve. The plagarist was expelled.

[graywarrior]

8. That's exactly what happened in this case.

And when it was reported to the professor, she just shrugged it off.

[LisaM]

10. What kind of a school is this?

They wouldn't have put up with this at Michigan.

[graywarrior]

14. Community College

I shouldn't expect any more of it.

[LisaM]

19. Well there is good and bad mixed in a community college

not to mention people pursuing a wide variety of agendas. My mother taught CC English and the variety of students she encountered was vast - from the serious trying to either save money or build credits towards a 4-year school to people who just wanted an AA degree and paid people to write papers for them.

[graywarrior]

21. Hell, I just went to my final in Adobe Illustration.

Worked my ass off to create a calendar using InDesign and find out that half the class either didn't finish their assignment or downloaded calendar templates and turned those in. WTF?

[LisaM]

22. Exactly.

You are now proficient in Illustration and if you tout that knowledge on a job resume, it will work out for you. For the others - not so much, if it's found they can't run the software.

I am beginning to lose patience with people who claim skills they don't have. Not to get into too much detail, but I am running into problems at work with people who simply can't master fairly easy software that should be required. And they don't care.

[graywarrior]

24. I'm amazed at the blaise attitudes these people have.

Makes you realize why lots of businesses suck. In this class, part of the grade was supposed to include getting up in front of the class and presenting your work. Nine out of twenty-two students did a presentation. Others either refused or claimed they left their USB's at home.

[kiva]

25. Yes you should.

As an instructor at a Community College I'll argue that you should expect - demand - that the school live up to the requirements of higher education. As several people have suggested, have your friend go up the chain (chair, dean, ect.).

I would never assign a graded group project for exactly the reasons you have stated. That said, I have heard that group projects are very popular in business classes - learning to integrate into the corporate population and all that - so your friend may have to deal with this situation again. If so, s/he needs to decide if s/he is willing to carry the bulk of the burden or challenge other members of the group to do their part - not fair, but it may be part of the business degree package.

[Chan790]

18. Take that to the department chair...

trust me when I say that no department chair or dean shrugs off plagiarism ever. It'd be viewed worse in Political Science or English than most departments but it's never a minor infraction.

[kwassa]

11. there are two different issues here

The inconsistency of the professor, and the group grade.

I've suffered from both, but not both at the same time. One never knows how consistent the professor is until the first mid-term, and by then it is a bit late. This is the bigger danger, actually.

I was in one group grade where we tried to expose and dump the shirker, and it was slammed back in our face. That was in business school. In a different grad school program, the only B I received in my otherwise straight-A average was a group grade project. Infuriating, but nothing I could do about it. The idea that one person can compensate for the lack of effort of others is really false; at presentation time, the others need to know what they are talking about. When they don't, the grade for all sinks. It sucks and is unfair, but that is just the way it is.

[graywarrior]

15. Sounds exactly like what happened here

[MadMaddie]

12. graywarrior I had assignments like that for my two graduate classes

In both classes we were broken into two teams I was lucky enough to have motivated team mates.

I am a project manager by trade and took the lead at times to direct our plans. We met on a teleconference call 1 week before the assignment was due to make sure we all agreed on the progress of the assignment. We broke up the assignment so everyone had a part to contribute and one person would compile the work for the final presentation. We would then have a final review.

So to answer your question:

The professor was not responsive, so I suggest that the student write up a detailed list of when they went to the professor, how the professor inappropriatly addressed the issue of students not pulling their weight in a class assignment. The student should present this evaluation to the powers that be.

I unfortunately had to right a bad review on one of my classes because the instructor was just not participating like he should have been.

Hope that helps.

[graywarrior]

16. Sound advice.

I will pass it on. I believe this guy will confront the head of the department.

[bigwillq]

13. Had a few classes like that.

We did ok. I was cool with it.

[LibDemAlways]

20. Group projects suck. There's always one person in the group who is

serious and a couple of slackers who think,"Hey this person is willing to do my work for me, cool." It's happened to my daughter several times in high school. She brought it to the attention of her teachers who shrugged it off. About all the person can do is bring it to the attention of the department chair and if that doesn't work keep heading up the ladder. No student's grade in any class at any level should suffer because of the laziness of somebody else.

[MilesColtrane]

23. That is absolute bullshit.

upon edit: I see my question about this being a community college was answered above.

I took a few CC courses before enrolling in a state college.

I couldn't believe how dull, stupid, and uninterested some of the teachers were there. Almost worse than coaches teaching math in high school.

[mike_c]

26. grey-- I'm a professor who sets up exactly those sorts of situations....

Are you interested in hearing the supporting rationale?

First and foremost, there is a large and growing accumulation of data that suggests group learning is significantly superior to individual effort alone, at least for most students, especially when it's ACTIVE group learning in which the groups must struggle together to achieve some outcome. For example, in some studies groups perform better than the best individual students within those groups in the overwhelming majority of times.

Second, collaborative performance is normal in most professions, so higher ed should teach and practice the skills necessary to succeed in those situations.

Finally, I tell my students that learning to operate effective collaborations is SO important that failing to make group projects work is FUNDAMENTAL failure that overshadows task oriented academic performance. When someone tells me that their grade would have been better if they were working alone or had a better group, I tell them that making their group work was their primary task, and that if they could not do that, they don't really deserve a better grade.

Having said that, I also think it's important to actually teach teamwork and collaboration skills, and to keep track of how groups are performing. I intervene when necessary. I provide training for my lab instructors so they can do the same. The truth is that higher ed has done a TERRIBLE job of teaching what are among the most important professional skills, and we can't expect students to succeed in collaborative learning unless we give them some foundational skills.

[graywarrior]

27. That makes sense.

However, if one student has collaborating experience from running several businesses and is suddenly teamed up with two students who have learning disabilities in reading and writing, plagiarism tendencies, outward animosity toward women instructors, and refusal to respond to emails regarding the assignment, what would you advise your student?

[mike_c]

29. frankly, that sounds incredibly dysfunctional....

I've seen groups go that bad, but thankfully not often-- partly, I think, because we talk about those sorts of issues and ways to deal with them from the very beginning in my classes.

But here's what I would do. First, I don't like groups of three. I prefer groups of five students, will accept groups of four or six, but rarely three. Part of the problem is that negative social interactions, including social loafing, seem less likely when group members feel greater social obligation to their other group members. Above six members, that starts to dilute (although there are ways around it). Below four, it seems not to establish as well. For the same reason, I keep groups intact for the whole semester, not just for a single project-- it often takes that first project or two, usually a shorter ice-breaking task-- to get good group dynamics established for the rest of the semester. I also make group work VERY SIGNIFICANT in class-- not just one or two projects. All my exams are group efforts, for example.

I also have groups negotiate a group charter as their first collective task, and the charter has to address individual commitment to shared objectives and outline HOW they intend to work together to solve problems. Group members also evaluate one another several times during the semester, and those evals affect their grades. If someone refuses to participate fully, for example, other group members can down rate the slacker's performance and it comes out of their grade.

When I have a group as dysfunctional as you describe-- and it really isn't very frequent-- I usually find out when one group member comes to speak with me privately. I give them advice about how to work toward a solution, depending on the problem-- it's usually a matter of communication-- remind them of their charter, etc. If the problem persists, and the student (or another) returns to report failure, I request a meeting with the entire group. Usually their lab instructor, too. We all discuss the problems, and try to find a solution. In rare cases it becomes apparent that one or two people are the real problem, and if they can't be convinced to change, I give them the opportunity to leave the group or the others the opportunity to expel them. This is a drastic move, because they're aware that as individuals their work load will increase significantly, and people who've gotten into trouble for slacking REALLY don't want to have to do all the work alone.

Sometimes the problems are intractable, but of the many hundreds of students who've gone through this sort of thing in my classes, I've had few unsolvable issues, really.

[graywarrior]

30. The group charter is the missing component in this group

Had they formed that sort of commitment, this would have turned out much better. We'll see what the final grade is. If it's below a B, I think it will be challenged.

[Broken_Hero]

28. My take/experience

is that I do the whole thing by myself. In college I had to do this a few times, where my other partners were lazy, uninterested, and didn't want to do a lick of work. So, essentially what I did, was I did the whole damn thing by myself. There is a bad/good side to this. Bad side, the other people in my group got a good grade based on doing "zero" work, the good side of this, at least I got a good grade.

My wife has had to deal with this numerous times with her online uni/and in college, and she basically does the same thing I do. She has complained to prof's and what not, but 9 times out of 10 they could really give a flip.

[pitohui]

31. just don't take those kind of classes in the first place

i was cum laude in college and part of the reason is before i signed up for any course i always researched the professors who taught it, by talking to people who had taken the course previously -- as an extra bonus, some of the people would loan me their notes, materials, old tests to study from, which was often a big help

i guess this don't work with crap introductory courses taught by self important "instructors" and grad students but it works very well for advanced courses taught by the same dudes year after year