How much do we get involved?

Parent Cafe
41

<p>“The guidebook for this course (there are 8 sections) encourages students to go to their professors about problems with the project - especially about team process. So it is probably OK for her to present her situation. She just should have done it about 3 weeks ago”</p>

<p>Well it seems the process of the project is just as important as the project itself was, and how each participant deals with the dynamics of working in a group good and bad. If she presents it clearly, the snags they encountered and how in the future one deals with working conflicts, different work ethics, she may garner a favorable response. Own it and repent I always tell my kids, one gains more respect if on bended knee with the solutions to avoid in the future.</p>

42

<p>calmom in post 18 posts the most logical response on this thread.</p>

<p>basically, you need to butt out and let your D solve it with her prof.</p>

<p>And there is nothing wrong with group projects, learning to effectively work with others (including handling issues and disputes) is something that everyone needs to learn</p>

43

<p>For some reason I find all this to be kind of unbelievable. I know that groups don’t always perform very well but to have 5 people in a group and 4 of them don’t do anything and then the upperclassman facilitator doesn’t do anything either seems pretty farfetched to me. Not to mention the fact that this is a freshman level class and they’ve had all semester to work on it. To add to that, I think they still have some time left since only the outline was due last thursday or friday? Therefore, your daughter was right to bring it up to the prof but in the event that the prof says tough luck, your D should suck it up and do it herself. It may be tough or whatnot, but it is her job to do the assignment and it’s the professor’s job to assign the grades. All you can do is hope that the professor does his job. Complaining about it doesn’t really do any good for anyone. If anything, I think something like this is an amazing experience for her and if she ends up doing the entire thing herself, can be definitely used as a positive influence for her future endeavors. Challenges always show what kind of person you are and I think you should just let her make her own decision on what to do and deal with it and use it. </p>

<p>Sorry, this just sounds like a great opportunity for her to experience life and I think if she perseveres through it then it’ll be awesome. But just continue to give her encouragement but under no circumstances should you get involved with the prof or university.</p>

44

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<p>I don’t agree. While I see the value in learning to work with groups, in my work experience the person who doesn’t produce in one project will not get another plum assignment - ever. Too many group members, once let down, won’t want to work with the dud again.</p>

<p>What is the analog in a school setting to this bad consequence?</p>

45

<p>things like this happen with group projects all the time.</p>

<p>of course, if the project is an F, then everyone will fail. but if the project gets a decent grade, then sometimes the group is allowed to grade each of the group members. so, if one person does all the work, they can give themselves a good grade and a bad grade to the others.</p>

<p>one time i was in a group project. we just couldn’t do it! we had other work that was more important, so we decided as a group (without the person who never showed up at group meetings) that we would do what we could but we would probably get an F. but for us the F wasn’t going to be enough to make any of us fail the class. we would all still pas and graduate. well, we got an F on the project and passed the class. except for the one girl. she FAILED the class and didn’t graduate because of it.</p>

<p>sucked for her. that’s for sure.</p>

46

<p>Wow. I must be missing something because I can’t imagine being that involved in the day to day of my college student’s academics. I have a junior and a freshman. I know my older son had some group projects along the way. With one he did call me once to complain about someone in the group but that was the extent of it. I’m not sure how he and the other students resolved it.<br>
I also remember that he has at times emailed professors to work through issues of one kind or another.<br>
The OP’s daughter left a lot of this until very late in the game. I would coach from afar and let her handle it. I see way too much parental involvement here. If the daughter thinks the parents will go to bat for her she will not have much reason to go to bat for herself. YMMV.</p>

47

<p>Well, the parent’s really CAN’T go to bat for her, and she will have to go to bat for herself. It really doesn’t matter if the parents try to get involved or not. The professor will just make a joke of having a parent call. Really. They’ll think it’s hillarious and it will color their perception of the student as a “serious” student. It’s just true.</p>

<p>That said, I really HATE group projects in academic environments. They aren’t actually the same as they are in the workforce. In the workforce it’s just different. Very rarely will management just leave a project to be completely handled by the brand new hires and not check in until it’s over. The professor, OTOH, doesn’t have to oversee. It’s artificial.</p>

48

<p>To everyone who is saying that group projects are meaningless in college, do you not think that OP’s daughter has learned lessons from this group? Don’t you think she will approach every group situation differently now? She was grouped with duds, but I’ll bet she has learned a lot about herself.</p>

49

<p>Yeah, she’ll learn lessons, but a failing grade for a student who otherwise would do fine on her own is a severe repercussion, I think.</p>

<p>And I strongly agree that they are artificial and do not reflect the work environment.</p>

50

<p>Yes, very artificial. The management in the work environment’s success is completely tied to the success of the group project: therefore, the less experienced the team, the more closely they will be overseen and the more often they will be expected to report back. In the classroom, only the team members success is tied to the success of the project and the management has no reason to intervene and every reason, convenience, time, whatnot, to just say, “handle it yourself.” Artificial in the extreme. Sad to say.</p>

<p>If the goal of team projects is to teach working on a team, then it should not be sink and swim. Real teaching involves involvement. ie. if the teacher REALLY wants them to learn about how to do team projects, grades should be given with each step of the process…ie…reports on the first meeting and how the work is divided up. grade #1. Are team members meeting deadlines…grade #2. Rough mock-up of the project and further team meetings…grade #3. Final lecture: this is how team projects work. etc…Final project grade #4. The way it is actually handled by most teachers does not allow for teaching opportunities, and perhaps this is why they are so collosally hated by students throughout the system.</p>

51

<p>Hey, we are only hearing one side of the story. Not even the kid’s side- the parent’s version of the kid’s side. My guess is that this will not be the first time the professor has seen this scenario play out; I would also bet that the knee jerk reaction (blame the others) is a very common impulse but perhaps not the optimal way to handle it.</p>

<p>Maybe the professor is waiting for one of the kids to show up with a diagnostic-- hey, here’s what we need to do, here’s how much time we’ll need to do it, we’ve learned not to dump the work on one person and we all need to step up the plate in order to finish the project. We need an extension of X weeks and we plan to email you our workplan every four days so you can see that we’re meeting our side of the bargain if you’ll grant the extension. That sounds a lot more mature and a better learning outcome than a call from a disgruntled Mommy that D has been used by her teammates and is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.</p>

<p>Unless this professor is 12 years old, this is not the first time a group has fallen apart midway through the assignment and so perhaps the real learning is in how to diagnose and fix a problem mid-way through.</p>

52

<p>I’ve only seen one truly successful group project in school. It was run by S2’s 7th grade teacher. She divided the class into groups of about five or six kids. Each group was to produce a magazine. She had the kids write cover letters and resumes for the positions they wanted on the magazines. Most of the work was done in the class and she fired the slacker students and gave them alternative boring work to do instead. Only one or two needed to be fired. The magazines were very professional looking and I never heard a peep of complaint about people not carrying their weight. I was happy to write a recommendation letter for the teacher to get an award and she was able to get grant money to publish those magazines.</p>

<p>As for the OP, I do think she needs to figure out how to make this work. It’s hard for me to believe that the rest of the students are fine with failing.</p>

53

<p>I just want to chime in on the worthlessness of team projects in college. To the contrary of most of the above posters, there is very definitely a place for team projects as some work cannot be accomplished individually in a vacuum. S1, an aerospace engineering major, has had group projects every semester from the start of freshmen year. Yes, in the beginning, the classes were set up to teach a team approach and professors more closely monitored progress. But there was always the intent of having the team figure out how to accomplish the goals and objectives in a dynamic group setting. As a junior he currently is working on a very technical satellite design-and-build project that consumes 12-16 hours every weekend (and in addition to the actual classroom and homework time for the course). It’s just not something that an individual student could do on his or her own. The team set-up mimics the way this technology is developed in the real world.</p>

54

<p>D. has been in group projects when she had to do most if not all work. She mentioned that it is frustrating but at the same time she knows that she is getting most out of assignment by doing the most for it and she is more reassured about grade “A”, which is always her goal. She has never been upset about something like this to the point of crying. We have always tried to find positive side in every negative situation.</p>

55

<p>poetgrl - I agree that your system of grading is a good one, but that sounds like the way my D’s high school projects were graded. Perhaps some professors assume kids have had group projects in high school that were properly paced and supervised. That is why I mentioned in an earlier post that it would have been better had the hard lesson the OP’s D is learning now been learned in high school - how to approach a group project, divide the work, set deadlines - and most importantly, size up right away who is not going to pull his/her weight and and the proper way to intervene. If that was the role of the facilitator in this scenario and he/she dropped the ball, then that is something the professor needs to address.</p>

56

<p>Cartera-- I agree. One of the issues profs face, however, when teaching entry level classes (I’m sure you know this) is that not every kid has the same proficiency. There are gaps to be filled in. In an intro course, particularly in a major which requires a lot of group projects, like business, I think the prof needs to be “management” and the students need to be “new hires.” Under that scenario, as with the aerospace example, I think it would be an excellent situation. However, if the student who is in charge of facilitating does not facilitate? How can this be allowed to effect the grades of these freshman without saying the teaching is not really going on?</p>

57

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<p>This assignment is only 30% of the grade so they wouldn’t necessarily flunk.</p>

<p>It is amazing to me to see how many college students out there don’t care, at least in their freshman year. The success rate of college students is around 50%, right? That’s a huge failure rate and that 50% has to come from somewhere.</p>

58

<p>It’s not hard for me to believe that they are okay with failing at all. A lot of college students don’t have any business being in college (for various reasons), but somehow they get there.</p>

59

<p>“my 2 cents are she needs to talk to the professor and the peer facilitator and tell them the facts. Tell her as long as she allows herself to be taken advantage of by others she WILL be taken advantage of!”</p>

<p>I agree. She has choices here, and they are tough choices, but she can choose to have the consequences of a bad grade due to letting people walk all over her, or she can talk to the professor. </p>

<p>She also needs to take full responsibility for this situation. If the group was self selected, she has a great deal of responsibility for choosing deadbeats to work with, and staying in the group once it was clear that the members weren’t doing their share.</p>

<p>Group assignments – while a PITA-- are excellent prep for the real world. </p>

<p>“The team met with the professor on Thursday to complain about the girl and he basically said he was hearing about this too late and couldn’t do anything. A peer facilitator who is an upperclassman is supposed to be meeting with the team weekly and has never done that.”</p>

<p>I agree with the professor. As the mom of a peer counselor, I would bet that if the group had asked the peer counselor to meet with them, the peer counselor would have done so. The whole group – including the OP’s D-- dropped the ball. </p>

<p>If the D ends up writing the project by herself, she could submit it as an individual project and let the other students twist in the wind as they deserve to do. Those deadbeats aren’t friends, and she has no obligation to them. If they become angry, tough. They’ll probably flunk out by the end of this semester anyway.</p>

<p>As for the parents asking about getting involved – other than giving advice to your D, there’s nothing else you can do. The prof is under no obligation to listen to you. In fact, the prof can’t talk to you about you D’s performance unless she gives written permission. If she does this, and you call the prof, the prof will simply feel that you have an immature, irresponsible student. The prof isn’t likely to change their policies.</p>

<p>My perspective comes from not only having college age kids myself, but also my having been a professor who gave group projects. I’d offer students the chance to do their projects as individuals or in groups that they selected. I also made it clear that if they chose a group with deadbeats, they could switch to doing an individual project, but if they submitted a group project, everyone would get the same grade even if only one person had done all of the work. I wasn’t going to magically save pushovers from being used by deadbeats.</p>

60

<p>"Right now, all the professor knows is that her group has one slacker. He doesn’t know that the rest of the group has left the building and is counting on your D to do all the work. He doesn’t know that it is affecting your D’s performance in the rest of her classes. </p>

<p>He needs to be informed."</p>

<p>The only workable solution that I can imagine the prof offering would be to allow the D to submit an individual project. Otherwise, there’s not much he can do. He also would have every right to not allow the student to submit an individual project because the problems with the group have been ongoing, and the D has waited until the last minute to let him know.</p>

<p>Your contacting the professor and/or administration will simply underscore the fact that your D has not done the work that she was required to do. Unless your D gives written permission for the faculty to talk to you about her academics, they will not be able to talk to you.</p>

<p>If she gives such permission for you to try to fix her problems with a group project, that would be indicating that your D lacks the maturity to be in college. Virtually every college student probably has some problems involving group projects. They learn to solve those problems without Mom or Dad intervening. However they choose to solve the problem, the students learn lessons that will help them cope with group projects they’ll undoubtedly encounter throughout their careers.</p>

<p>“. Now, if the professor does not have a humane response to her email, it will be very hard for me to not contact the school. By the way, the professor is also her advisor. Tomorrow, the groups are supposed to present orally on their outlines. I can’t imagine what the other team members are even thinking.”</p>

<p>Your D dropped the ball as did the other group members. By requesting confidentiality of the professor, the D also is enabling the slackers. If she’s the only one who has done any work, she needs to present her report as an individual report, and let the chips fall as they may for the students who didn’t do anything.</p>