<p>Marriage is a group project.</p>
<p>OP, given that your D is a the Newhouse school, it probably would be helpful to know that my perspective comes from being a former journalism professor and being married to a current journalism professor. Group projects are a mainstay of the journalism field. The earlier your D learns how to handle them, the better.</p>
<p>Again, thanks for your time and insights. Group projects are and will continue to be a major part of my daughter’s college experience. In fact, this approach is one of the reasons that she chose this school. Our son, who is at a different college, says that group projects were the best part of his education. But, they can definitely be unfair - which is a real world experience.</p>
<p>The group members were assigned. The project is designed very intelligently with different parts being worth different amounts along the way. There are still chances for the group to work together.
This has been a great learning experience for her. And she knows that she deserves some of the blame here for the last-minute approach which she has owned up to with the prof. She is definitely trying to make the best of this but there is absolutely no way that she could do the entire project by herself. And that’s why she had to go to the prof.
It is fairly unbelievable that 4 of the group members are slackers - and that is the main point that my D made to the prof. That fact made it very hard for her to confront the others or go to the professor. She feels that if she had one other caring teammate, she could have handled this.
The only reason that we became so involved is that she interviewed my husband as part of her research. I am absolutely convinced that it was good that we counseled her about what to do. The one aspect that you all seem to agree on is that we should not contact the school. And we agree with this too at this point.</p>
<p>I’ll be interested to see how this turns out if the OP chooses to report back.</p>
<p>But I don’t agree with the notion that school group projects are good practice for later workplace experiences.</p>
<p>School group project situations vary markedly from workplace project situations. Usually workplace projects have a project manager or someone who is (at least nominally) in charge, while school projects often (usually) have a group of peers working together. Workplace projects usually incorporate people with varying levels of experience both with the project subject matter and with the firm; school projects are most often the blind leading the blind, and I suspect that this is where many of the projects first go off course. Workplace projects most frequently involve people working at the same location on the same shift (though this isn’t true of some complex projects), while school projects often throw together students whose schedules don’t overlap much except for the hours in which they’re in the same course. In a business situation, if someone isn’t pulling their own weight, the project manager ought to ride herd, in a school situation you have peers trying to ride herd on peers, which isn’t likely to be effective unless the kids have received training and support in how to do this.</p>
<p>I’m not averse to students learning through group projects, but I fear that what they most often learn is that they hate group projects. If we really wanted to set up group projects with the goal of having them be effective learning environments, I think we’d do more to set them up in a way that is likely to be successful, and which would teach them techniques other than doing all the work for the team members who didn’t participate. Lord of the Flies may be a good novel, but it is not a good model for how kids ought to learn teamwork.</p>
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<p>Be careful what you wish for…</p>
<p>Freshman Son has a group project in one of his classes this semester. Teams were drawn randomly by the professor. My son has commented that the one other boy on the project team is on the college’s soccer team, and that the two girls on the team are varsity athletes as well. It is sometimes very difficult for them to schedule the times they need to meet to work together; they all have conflicting schedules. It could have been a nightmare.</p>
<p>But my son reports that they are getting the project done, and getting it done well. Despite scheduling meetings at midnight if necessary. They broke it down into small, manageable bites and did a spreadsheet showing who was responsible for what and by when (always 2 days before the due date so there is time to fix things), and for the most part they have stuck to it. They check in with each other before each class in case questions or difficulty have come up. They keep each other honest and on track.</p>
<p>My son learned excellent project management skills in his major high school EC and he is certainly putting them to use now. But it’s also the luck of the draw. </p>
<p>His roomie is taking the same course with the same assignment and his group is a disaster. My S has tried to help his roomie get things organized but that team seems to have all chiefs and no Indians. They all want to tell each other what to do but no one seems to want to do the actual work! They don’t seem to be able to break things down by talents or schedule/availability.</p>
<p>Sometimes I think that the actual point of some of these group projects is to learn to work effectively in a group and not so much the actual knowledge gained in the project itself, although that is of course important too. In fields like engineering or business, it’s as important as the substantive knowledge one brings to the employer.</p>
<p>After meeting with the TA for the course, my son learned that at the end of the project, the students need to evaluate their project and each other’s contributions. All of this will be considered in the grade assigned, both to the group and the indvidual grade adjustments. My son said the group plans to submit the spreadsheet they created and adhered to in support of their positive evaluations of one another.</p>
<p>I hate group projects.
I think group projects are essential. (My profession revolves around group projects.)</p>
<p>One professor I know, assigns a few group projects, but then asks the students to also evaluate each other, and the evaluations are considered in grading. Fewer slackers usually result, although I suppose some could gang up on others in their evaluations.</p>
<p>I hate it when we get to contribute to the grading of our peers. I have been physically threatened for attempting to honestly mark my partners when I have done the bulk of the work and they have left me out to dry, because they almost always agree ahead of time to just give everybody A’s and I refuse to do that if the work hasn’t been divided fairly. Or when we get to pick a grade for ourselves, and I mark myself down to a B or C as I feel appropriately and they give themselves A’s and it looks like they did all the work when it was ACTUALLY ME. I have never, ever had an honest experience with any kind of a group grading practice that allows group members to provide an evaluation. Students abuse that system terribly.</p>
<p>Twoparent, I am a college professor,and I would strongly advise your D to schedule a face-to-face meeting with the professor rather than presenting her case via email and expecting a “humane” response. If a student wrote me such an email, my only response would be, “Come in and see me.” I would never attempt to resolve such a complex situation via email. Many students let off steam by writing long emails and pressing “send,” and that behavior doesn’t give a good impression (your son’s advice notwithstanding). Your D will show true concern and maturity by visiting her professor’s office hours and presenting her case in person. She will make a greater impact that way.</p>
<p>I find it better to handle personnel matters at work in a face-to-face situation, and especially where there is no physical record of the conversation. There can be privacy issues at play and some of the things that you want to convey would look bad in the New York Times.</p>
<p>“Some of the things that you want to convery would look bad in the New York Times.”</p>
<p>Oh, the lessons we have to learn! My mother always taught me never to put anything in writing that I didn’t feel comfortable having everyone hear. (This was in relation to love letters :eek: of course). I think this is very good advice our kids with FB and texting and the whole reality TV thing don’t actually always “get.”</p>
<p>Twoparent, what happened?</p>
<p>So far, the school has been absolutely wonderful about helping my daughter help herself with a very unusual and difficult situation - which is what she wanted. Of course, she is in the middle of this problem right now and she won’t know how it resolves until the project is completed.<br>
It’s not about the grade anymore for her, it’s about problem-solving and not letting others take advantage of her.</p>
<p>^^ I’ll bet from here forward she’s going to be very careful about who she partners with if given a choice and in any case will take more charge and be more assertive with her partners when she gets slackers. She’ll probably carry some of this assertiveness with her when she has to deal with other incompetents in life later that we all have to deal with. In the end, she’ll probably have gained something from all this although it’s been a difficult and frustrating experience for her. I’m glad it sounds as if things are sorting themselves out.</p>
<p>Those spine chilling words “group project” do not go away. They are even there when one attends graduate school, and it’s hell being the “smart one” when you’re 48 years old! Classes begin with a few, smaller, in-class groups and that’s where the leeches learn who will do the work and from then on, the signal,“break into small groups”, unleashes a feeding frenzy. Supposedly, it is to mirror what goes on in the " working world", but the only groups I ever saw at work were clustered around a computer screen, watching videos on YouTube or looking at real estate sites!</p>
<p>Lol! …</p>
<p>What happened?</p>