I hate group projects for school! Post your horror stories here. (HypnoToad might like this.)

I'm taking a software engineering class which is mostly about engineering process and stuff. I am the project manager for a team of eight people including myself.

- Three people have told me they don't want to write source code because they haven't done it in six or seven years, which is required.

- These same three people had three weeks to learn how to create a project in C# with just blank classes and have told me it's too hard.

- I asked them if they could meet their assigned coding task and they said "we will try".

- The component engineer was supposed to draw a class diagram, but borrowed from other peoples' diagrams (which is fine and expected) but didn't know what the classes on the diagrams did so couldn't write descriptions. There aren't very many classes but he said it would take one or two days to classify the classes into packages (What? That's ten minutes of work.) and it would take days to write descriptions. We have two and a half weeks to code and test the thing and these documents are necessary just to tell people what to do. I went and did it myself and it took 40-60 minutes.

- The architect of the project is supposed to select a set of use cases and a package diagram; he sent it to everyone in an email. I told him put it in a document I could submit to the TA and paste the diagram into it, this took three days rather than the ten minutes (and I had to ask him twice for it).

- The last two people I mentioned were on critical paths and set the schedule back about a week for what should have taken at the most three days.

- At least three of us have about $3000 riding on this class; if I don't get a B I don't get the money back from my company and the others have a similar grade requirement. I have already kissed the cash goodbye. If I get it back it will seem like I won a prize.

HypnoToad: The reason I singled you out is you're the only person on here I can remember also writes software!

I've been working the ref, emailing my TA about these problems, so hopefully they won't reflect on me, but we get graded on how we follow the process (which I've had to circumvent in order to try to get the product done) and the product (which I've had to cut the scope of due to people delaying the process).

:grr:

with really annoying people.

meh.

The rest are shameless in their lack of/poor contribution! They'll be like "I don't know how to _____!" FIGURE IT OUT OR I'LL HAVE TO FIGURE IT OUT FOR YOU! At least tell me that you asked the TA about how it's been done in the past!

I have compassion for people, and if I don't know their situation, I will give them the benefit of the doubt. That is why I'm a liberal.

But if I do know someone's situation and know they are just being lazy, I am so fucken pissed because they abused my benefit of the doubt on top of their sloth!

like yesterday, in biology, we were doing this thing with eggs and the eggs felt really cool and squishy and I wanted to put one in the water cup or whatever and this guy like wouldn't let me. So my inner spoiled-freeper came out in the form of "GIVE ME THE EGG NOW"...hehe

i hate it when people are lazy in project groups....meh. makes me mad.

- and one of the results of Bloomberg and Klein deferring to the "experts" (ed schools) is that at this point, in a 45 minute period, a teacher is only supposed to interact with the class as a class (ask questions, answer questions, lecture, etc.) for 7 minutes a period. For the other 38 minutes, we're supposed to put the kids into groups, where they will learn it all themselves, don't-ya-know. Very Mao. Very Cultural Revolution.

(Thankfully, even principals who believe this (as well as say it) know that you just can't try to enforce this on a daily basis. Most of them anyway.)

...during the cultural revolution. I don't know if that's true, but he wasn't a dittohead or something where they spread weird rumors like that.

When I was an undergraduate, I got a lot out of studying with people for exams (and had a lot of fun too), but I couldn't imagine 38 minutes out of a period doing that.

We had groups of about 4 or 5. It was a long time ago, so some of the specifics elude me, but I know it involved analyzing different types of terrain, coming up with different names for "river" used throughout the US, giving various reasons why certain places were more inhabited than others, and so forth, along those lines.

Anyway, I remember the group just sat around and did the equivalent of twiddling their thumbs - every time. We wouldn't get anything done unless and until I gave a suggestion or figured out an answer, at which point everyone would just copy down what I said.

Eventually, right off the bat they'd just ask me what all the answers were.

:grr:

:)

I have a B.S. and M.S. in computer science and now write software professionally. I also know that there are other programmers around.

I took a software engineering course as an undergrad. My team was completely incompetent. I was the only one there who had used source control before, so I had to teach them that. Anyway, since it was quickly realized that I knew the most out of the group, I became the unofficial team leader. Wanting these people to contribute, I gave them specific classes and functions to write. I handed them the public interface I wanted so that I could glue everything together. They couldn't give me what I asked for, and they were simple functions. After writing the first two projects nearly alone when nobody else could finish their pieces, I dropped the course. I didn't need it, and I didn't want to suffer that way for the rest of the semester. I have no idea how they did.

My senior capstone design team was, however, excellent. We were a group of five, and everybody was very intelligent and everybody did their work, and everybody did their work properly. I was lucky with those guys.

I now work with a small team of professional programmers (10 of us) at a software company. They're all very competent too, and it's great working with them.

As an undergrad, I was invariably the only person who really cared about getting a good grade on anything, so I invariably ended up doing all the work.

My worst story: I had to do a 5-person group paper :eyes: in a class required for my major. One of the other girls in my group just happened to be in another class with me (an honors seminar) and she was one of the top students in the department. The other three dolts were sleepwalking through their undergraduate education, waking up only when it was time to party. This other girl and I made a sincere effort to get the other three motivated and working, but to no avail. She and I ended up writing the entire paper by ourselves - I did all the research, and she wrote it. The other three literally contributed nothing. Zip, zero, zilch. One guy brought in a piece of research that wasn't even related to our topic and was proud of himself for "working so hard". I can't even remember what the other two did. We got an A, but it was pathetic.

In another class, I was in a group where we had to write a paper about a topic and then do a presentation. There were 5 of us in the group. I volunteered to write the paper if they would put together the presentation. The paper got an A and the professor kept it to show future classes an example of what he was looking for in the project. When it came to presentation day, I showed up expecting them to be prepared, and we completely bombed. The presentation got a C-. The professor yelled at me later, saying, "Why didn't you make sure they were prepared", as though it were somehow my duty in life to pull 4 unmotivated morons up with me in every single class. I essentially told him I was tired of being my brother's keeper. I don't think he got it.

As a TA now, I never force my students to do group projects. I've had professors say to me, "How are they going to learn to get along in the real world if they don't learn how to work with others now". I always tell them that I've worked in the real world, and in the real world if you sit on your co-workers' coattails you get fired. That's usually sufficient motivation for the slackers to grow up and get with the program. Why should I make the decent students suffer now for nothing?

I have to say, in graduate school I have had none of the group project problems I had as an undergrad. I've done several group projects in graduate school, and it was a refreshing relief to find that when you meet with the other people in your group, everybody has their portion done on time, and it's almost always quality work. There have been no conflicts or problems at all and in fact the grad school group experiences have been interesting and useful for me. Those experiences just cemented my belief that it isn't about "not knowing how to get along with others", but rather the character of the others one is expected to get along with.

and that I can do 10000 times faster while alone.

I'm in law school. When I am an actual lawyer, I will not be sitting in a law library in a team of 6, researching a single statute. (I'll be doing that online, I imagine, but anyway.) I won't be collaborating with a partner to make sure all my citations are correct. I can look up citations in a Bluebook in about 30 seconds, but can't just barrel through it when working with a partner.