Vylo

I have had simliar instances, but in most of my classes our teachers give us score charts to rate how much the rest of our team contributed to the project. Teachers catch on fast when they see the results from these cards. In another case, my group divided up the work. When we got called together for a meeting, and I noticed I was the only one there I knew it was trouble. I did the whole project myself, but didn't inform my other team mates. When time came in to hand in the project I handed in a complete project and informed the teacher that I was the only one who worked on it. Since none of my team was familiar with the material I produced, they were completely unprepared to defend themselves to this claim. I got an A, they all failed the class.

brighid

I have had similar experiences and it is maddening!

I had some management class and we had to do a project with three other people in our class. One other lady in the group actually contributed and the other two did basically nothing. One girl faxed me her ideas that were literally, near identical reiterations of the outline I sent her!

Thankfully half of the grade was for the presentation of this project and it was QUITE obvious that the other two hadn't done jack shit when it came time to present to the class and the prof asked a bunch of questions. It was reflected in their grade and both I and the other contributing student received high marks.

Another time I got stuck with a partner no one else wanted for a German presentation - 2 long friggin hours worth of oral presentation even. Oh that sucked! It was partly because he was really at a first year level (like freshmen in highschool) in an advanced group (it was not a credited course, but a program the University offered for foreign language students.) It really wasn't his fault that we were mismatched, but it was really difficult putting together a project that needed to be translated from English to German and give that lengthy of a presentation with someone who could hardly speak the language.

I don't think anyone should be responsible for the failures of the lazy people in a group. I think the sort of one grade for everyone, regardless of actual participation makes it very easy for some people to be lazy. They are going to get a good grade because they know SOMEONE is going to do the work - usually the person who cares about their grade.

Brighid

fatherphil

some folks don't adhere to your set of morals and may see "freeriding" as a noble and admiralble ocupation.

avoid classes which participate in such practices or form a core group of individuals to take these classes with.

Loren Pechtel

I've had the experience, but fortunately I've been able to do it on my own when I saw how useful my team-mates were.

ju'iblex

both my sister and a friend of mine had this same problem, although it was more 3 people out of the 5 in the group doing the work. The university's solution to this was to give them all a group mark sheet at the end of it, and to give their group members a mark and rant themselves stupid about how Joe Blow did shit-all, and it actually seemed to work. I think the lecturers looked for complaints within the group which were the same about a particular member and marked each person accordingly, and it worked.

My suggestion is to go to the lecturers, complain, and keep them up to date on your progress, and keep logs of when and what work you were doing. It's worth a shot.

Demosthenes

I've had the opposite problem. One time my group had to do a project about GLBT exclusion from the society. There were 8 people in my group and out of that, four or five did all the work. They refused to share any of the work load. I had to drag something to do out of those people. They didn't bother to take my suggestions or work into account and the final presentation didn't even incorporate any of the work that I had done. even galling was how this girl who hadn't come to the meeting for a few times walked into a meeting for the first time and she was promptly given a shit load of work to do and was included in everything. Meanwhile I who had been attending to every meetings was excluded. It made me so mad, especially given the ironic hypocrisy because of the very topic our group was working on. I went to the professor with my complaints. While she thanked me for bringing it to her there was nothign she could do. But we did had a group evaluation form at the end and you can imagine just what I wrote on it.

chopboy

one of my lecturers found a novel solution to this problem, actually last years class came up with it.

the idea is that you write out, as a group, a statement containing the work done by each member. then each member of the group signs off on the validity of the statement. If there are any quarrals about what goes in the statement then you take it to the lecturer and sort it out with him/her. All the group was aware it was happening from the outset. i understand it worked exceptionally well last year.

xorbie

Demosthenes has a very good point, and it is a problem I have had (though in high school - I will be attending college this fall). The opposite problem sometimes is a problem, where people in the group refuse to let those who actually know what the hell is going on do something. Quite frankly, I would usually rather do more than less work, because I tend to be the most compitent of the people in the group.

The drawback of this is that I am generally considered as a person who will pretty much do an entire group project by themselves, which can suck.

Anyhow, I do think that the solution to this problem does lie in the the professor - a good one will generally prevent this sort of thing from happenening.

ajm51987

I have the problem in my High School. I was a zerox machine in Biology...and in Spanish...and In History. I'm just a damn push over. The only class I was not was English. People would ask me if they could copy my work. I said no, do you do your own work, then they would say I was so mean. I hate high school.

Clutch

I hated doing the damn things back in grade school, and never did one at university. Now I do not assign them to my students, and never will, may I be struck by lightening if I lie.