<p>Hi Students:
I wish I had found your question sooner. I am a college professor who assigns a lot of group projects and this is how I like to see my students handling things.</p>
<p>Every time you meet, assign one member to take some notes and then to draft some type of short (1 paragraph summary) of the meeting. include: who was present and who was absent; any decisions you made about the divvying up of responsibilities.</p>
<p>After the meeting, have your secretary e-mail the paragraph to all members and cc your professor on the e-mail.<br>
At the end of the semester, your prof will then have in her possession a STRING of e-mails from your committee indicating that this member did not attend and did not participate. Your prof will then likely dock the student’s grade.<br>
It is NOT your decision regarding what grade the student gets, or how the professor handles it. It is, however, your responsibility to keep your prof ‘in the loop’ when there is a member who does not participate or carry his weight.<br>
If you have a persistent problem, one of you (or all of you) might also go to the prof’s office hours, and say that you just want to make sure that he or she was getting your e-mailed summary of the minutes from your meeting. Don’t complain about the other student – Just keep it neutral, “we wanted to make sure you knew what was going on in our group.”</p>
<p>Maybe too late for you guys now, but something to keep in mind for next semester. Thanks.</p>
<p>Thanks so much for your response! That’s really helpful, and it’s definitely something I’ll keep in mind for future projects. </p>
<p>Our presentation has actually been postponed until tomorrow, but my group member has still barely contributed anything. On Sunday night (we thought we were presenting Monday) he threw in like 7 slides in a random spot with just a bunch of quotes from his articles. (NOT what we were supposed to do). I had to move them around and fix them myself, and later that day in class, he had the audacity/stupidity to ask me if they looked okay and if I wanted to add anything. (I made it clear that it was his responsibility and his part since I did practically everything else). </p>
<p>Our professor has us rate our partners in the end, so I’ll definitely make it clear that he did nothing. We didn’t end up going to our prof because we didn’t want to annoy him or not seem mature enough to handle it ourselves. We just buckled down and did all the work ourselves because we realized that in the end, we’re gaining a lot of life and presentation experience while group member #4 is remaining nothing but a useless slacker.</p>
<p>Sounds like you have worked it out, but I do want to stress again the importance of documenting things. If I got an eval from a member of a group that said, “We met six times and Charlie only showed up twice, at the two final meetings. We each read and discussed two articles per meeting and thus we all read twelve articles, except for Charlie, who only read four,” this would be good information for a prof, as opposed to a more nebulous statement like “Charlie didn’t do as much work as everyone else did.”</p>
<p>It’s good to get in the habit of documenting things like this, because as you point out, in life you will also have to work in group settings. Keeping stats like this will help you to stick up for your own interests, as well as being useful if you’re a boss someday who has to fire someone.</p>
<p>As an attorney, I definitely support Momzie’s advice to document in real time what is going on. I don’t know if it is necessary to keep the professor in the loop, but having support later-on is very helpful.<br>
I know this particular presentation is over, but her advice for real life going forward is spot on. Documentation (even brief, just a few sentences) as it happens is much more credible than recollection after the fact.<br>
I hope it went well today!</p>
<p>D2 is in grad school, and a multimedia science-based group project is nearing deadline. One of three is distant, the other engaged in the process but doesn’t possess the media skills to contribute efficiently. D2 double-degreed in science and media comm, and wants this project to be part of her portfolio for an internship. So she asked me about this dilemma.</p>
<p>The answer was easy, unfortunately. D2 is going to have to bear the lion’s share of the work. It appears that she is the only one that would be using this in a portfolio, thus she doesn’t want to use any copyrighted materiel. She initially tried to teach the engaged member the ins & outs of video editing but found that was not time-efficient. I told her she is going to have to walk the fine line of directing without appearing bossy. </p>
<p>I told her that if she enters corporate America at some point, this scenario will be played out again & again.</p>
<p>Thanks for the additional, excellent advice!! Throughout all of this, I think I learned a lot more than just information about my research topic. </p>
<p>I will definitely take heed of proper documentation. I did this to an extent for this instance (I screen-shotted the agendas and article links I put on the Google Docs and saved the emails I sent to the group member, and then told my prof about them in our peer review), but if I ever come across this situation again, I like the real-time tactic. </p>
<p>As it turned out, excluding group member #4 and his parts, we had a good presentation. For his 3 slides composed of only quotes, he spluttered through an explanation and I actually had to cut him off a bit because we were running out of time. But all in all, our prof said we hit the major themes he wanted us to hit (he assigned our topic) and that we were thorough. </p>
<p>Hopefully this will be my last group project for a while!! It’s draining.</p>
<p>I’m in grad school and in my earlier classes, we had a major group project in every class. The real kicker is, they were all online courses (through a brick and mortar college). Trying to find time for people who were working full time, had families, classes, etc. to even have conference calls was a huge challenge, let alone getting a cohesive paper done. Regardless, in every single case, one or two people did most of the work, one person did an OK amount and the fourth person was a slacker- when the groups were assigned. When we got to choose our group members, one other class member and I always paired up and selected two more people who did the best work on the discussion boards that were part of class.</p>
<p>In one course, the groups were assigned and we had one group member who had stopped posting on discussion boards and was not responding to our emails. I emailed the professor to inquire whether he had dropped the class because there was no way for us to know. All we had was his school email address and no other way to attempt to contact him. What a fiasco. We never heard a word from him. After I asked the professor about him, the professor said he couldn’t tell me anything because of FERPA. For all we knew, the guy had died or something. It was ridiculous. The professor did institute peer reviews that could either add or subtract 10 points if your group gave you a very good or very bad rating. </p>
<p>Never did find out what happened to that guy.</p>
<p>I feel for you. I was lucky I managed to avoid most group projects. The one major one I had (in a tax class), I sat next to a very bright young lady in the class and as soon as the project was announced she asked me if we could work together (I was pleased to be asked as being far older than anyone else in the class I was not sure anyone would want me in their group - but we had been in the class long enough we both knew the other was good). The funny thing was the young man that sat on the other side and was always chatting to a bevvy of young lady friends immediately leaned over and asked to join us, much to the surprise of those young ladies. Our little group of 3 turned out to be a great group. </p>
<p>Nevertheless I managed to wiggle out of the group projects (5 of them) in the next tax class because I was working full time and commuting 100 miles twice a week to the class. The prof let me be a group of one as she agreed it would be hard for me do meet up with a group. More work, much less stress.</p>
<p>You do the work for the kid and put your names on it. Give him a chance first to present his piece and then come after him with what you all did, and include a note to the prof about the situation.</p>
<p>Sadly this happens a lot and some times, the teacher, prof, employer does not care about the group mechanics. You get graded or credited as a team and the project as a whole. My son was in a group project where the one student’s contributions were truly sub par. Couldn’t write, analysis incomplete, etc, So they submitted and presented it as such, and were graded as a group with tha weak point averaged in. Prof could not care less that it was because of a weak member of the group, and just pitched the note with documenation. When the members protested and met privately, they were told, in the real world, which is where they soon will be with possible such projects, that’s what would have happend.</p>
<p>Don’t agree about the prof doing it this way for college, but she was right about this in many work situations… My DH has had to redo and take over weak group members’ work on projects all of the time. You simply won’t get the work if you turn in a weak proposal, and too much rides on the real life business consequences. A client or prospect could not care less that you had a member not pulling his weight, nor would a boss having to present something put together by a team. You have to submit a stellar final project and deal with the deficient member later, and separately. </p>
<p>But for school, that, to me, is a whole other situation, and the teachers/profs should be taking that into consideration. But they may not. You get adjuncts who are full time in the real world, just teaching a class or two, they may run the assignments as they do at their jobs.</p>
<p>My daughter had a lazy partner in 9th grade. An assigned group of 5. 1 boy did nothing, but kept telling them he was working on it. The project was instead of a final exam. On presentation day, he showed up with nothing. The group received 78% which counted for 20% of their course grade. That little lesson cost my D being valedictorian.</p>
<p>She already graduated. Just pointing out it was a lesson learned at 14 that had a cost 3 years later. If you’re in a group project, schedule a run-through a week ahead of time so the slacker’s portion can be split up among the rest of the group.</p>
<p>If the final product (paper, presentation, mpg, etc) is a given a group grade then each member is responsible for both their share and the whole thing. Similar to an apartment lease, if you and your roommate both sign the lease and your roommate flakes out, the landlord can come after you for the whole thing.</p>
<p>My point is, hand in the work that you would be proud of, that will get the grade that you want. If that means doing more than your fair share of the work, so be it. The only time the professor needs to get involved would be if you cannot get the slacker to accept that their work is no good.</p>
<p>Both of my sons have been involved in group projects at college. With the more extensive projects, the professors each had a plan in place to take care of lazy people. In one example, there was an official written warning system in place that the group had to use. In other examples, the professors asked for feedback at the end on the group members’ individual work habits and contributions. Grades were awarded accordingly. So I think my kids have been fortunate in that slackers were not rewarded with grades they did not earn.</p>
<p>I like the idea of documenting everything. That is something to consider for the future whether one is in school or in the workplace. Even just emailing the group regarding concerns would be good. That way you have a paper trail. Just saying you talked about it isn’t as effective.</p>
<p>Otherwise, I would say you just have to pick up the slack. There are people that get work done and people who like to goof off. That never changes. So its good that you get to experience this before you hit the workplace.</p>
<p>“There are people that get work done and people who like to goof off. That never changes. So its good that you get to experience this before you hit the workplace.”</p>
<p>In the workplace, does everyone in the group get the same pay raises and promotion opportunities, or are people evaluated on individual review? Yes, the project may need to be done on time and with quality, but a good manager will know who contributed and who didn’t and make decisions accordingly when bonuses are given or layoffs are needed. There are long-term consequences at work which are very lacking in these group school projects. </p>
<p>My younger daughter isn’t even in high school yet and she’s already had way more than she needs of this kind of “experience”, knocking herself out to do high quality work for as many as 4-5 other kids who are too lazy or incapable of doing it themselves. It’s really not helpful for anyone concerned. The slackers aren’t held to consequences and learn they can get through life by slacking. Even well-meaning kids who want to try but are just slow, are probably going to be steamrolled by high achievers who have been trained that “group project” means “go work like crazy because you have to do it all”. Nobody is getting a good interactive experience.</p>
<p>The usual system in schools seems to be to assign mixed groups, with the assumption that the more capable students will teach the others. I really don’t think this is the best system for anyone. I can’t tell you how happy I was when my daughter was put in groups assigned by how well the students were already doing in the class. The good students had the opportunity to work with other good students who would pull their weight. The slackers had to work with other slackers and either take the consequences, or else actually do some work and learn something for a change. And the less capable students could develop their ideas without someone else saying, no, do it this way.</p>
I had one teacher who did group tests this way. Rather than mixing groups of students together for group tests, she arranged by grades and work ethics. It was a fabulous system. The “slackers” would always comment how it wasn’t fair that the “harder working” groups got higher grades. She would contest back saying, “If you want a higher grade work for it.”</p>
<p>Our kids (like most here) were always saddled with those who needed “extra help,” to give them a ball & chain around their ankles–from pre-school through HS. Our kids HATED group work because of it and were always so relieved when they were allowed to do individual work. Teachers who just let slackers slide are doing no one any favors.</p>
<p>Fortunately, in engineering and cinema, everyone had to pull their weight or was dumped from the program. The kids were fine doing group work there and in fact HAD to in order to complete the tasks they needed to get done. </p>
<p>Yes, real life and work DOES have slackers, but there ARE consequences for them. If the instructor penalizes everyone for the slacker, what lessons are learned? Are those the INTENDED lessons?</p>
<p>I think for school projects having to take up the slack just teaches the wrong lessons to the slacker. That said if you get stuck with a group project and a slacker I’d take it up with the professor/teacher as to what they recommend. If everyone is going to get the same grade, you obviously are going it have to do the slacker’s work. </p>
<p>I only saw one group project work really well. In middle school my kid was in an English class where the teacher had gotten a grant for them to put together magazines. They were in groups of about six kids. Everyone had an assigned job - generally to write at least one article and something else - editor, art director, cover designer whatever. The groups agreed on a theme and went to work. The teacher kept an eye on them. While articles were written as homework - everything else took place in class. If someone didn’t pull their weight she fired them and had them do really boring grammar work instead. (And I use the word fired on purpose - she structured it like a job - they’d had to put together resumes to apply for the various magazine positions.) Only a handful of kids in all her classes got fired. The results were amazingly professional and I never heard a peep of complaint from kid about the whole process.</p>
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