$%$#ing Group Assignments
 

My God do I hate group assignments. I am currently doing a group assignment about nuclear failure and I can't get over how useless some of my members are.

I will show you guys her intro paragraph to her section one of my members wrote for an essay we had to make (which is really hard to do with 5 people collaborating on one essay). Take into consideration she redid this five times and this is her best shot.

"As nuclear power being a deadly type of chemical; an accident is economically disturbed and people’s lives are at risk. The substantial consequences of a nuclear power accident are infinite because there is on incident leads to another creating the domino effect...Creating and assuring all preventions of an accident will absolutely initiate a successful plant and protect the ecosystem and man kind. "

How did this person get into university and why do I have to put up with this. Drives me insane last essay we had to do I of course got paired up with her. I was forced to rewrite her entire section! My professor is horrendous and doesn't let us pick who we work with. Worst class ever. I don't even understand why essays are a group assignment the whole class makes 0 sense and I haven't learned a damn thing in it (science technology and society 201 btw).

Not only is it horribly written but its completely out of place with the flow and theme of the other work.

Group projects are always the worst, I always assume the leadership position and do 90% of the work :(

I feel you man.

I got paired up with this weirdo who always wants to meet obnoxiously early in the morning for some project that isn't due for a month.

Doesn't he understand i need to get drunk most nights of the week? Im not trying to wake up for that ****, i don't even care about my grade that much, im only in class to defer these loans i took out earlier.

I do as well. I try hard to be a good motivator and stern and understanding and all that what not but sometimes I just lose my patience and do it my self. Like with this assignment.

I just wish my group would stop complaining about the class and realize its going to rape their GPA and is in many ways as important as a class they enjoy.

@Sparky atleast hes willing to do something we had to do a presentation as one project and 2 of my members were 20 minutes late and I had to present their parts. Wow this is actually such bull**** now that I think about it

I've never heard of someone assigning essays for group work. It just seems like a recipe for disaster.

I KNOW WHO DOES THAT!?!?!?!

Most confusing baffling professor! Hes got a 2 out of 5 on ratemyprof.com

Haha! I just finished a 43 page financial analysis of UPS for my Econ class. It was split between me and 5 other people.

It actually wasn't bad. Almost everyone did their fair share, and only one guy was a horrendous writer whose parts had to be heavily revised.

Oh yeah? Well maybe its not that weird but for a junior course its driving me insane especially since its such an incredibly opinion based essay.

A financial analysis is one thing, where you can divide it up into clear parts for each group member to work on, but writing what seems to be an argumentative essay (I think it is anyways; that intro was butchered) is another. It just seems really weird to me.

lmfao...
Seems like she just got a thesaurus and used every big word she could find, without even knowing what they meant in context with what she was trying to say.

Her grammatical style is eerily similar to those spam bots that seem like they're translating foreign languages to English in Google Translate.

If I want to slap the sh*t out of her, I can't even imagine how you feel.

Worst part is she was on the more tolerable side. First group we had a guy named David who was just as useless but incredibly rude and just wanted to hook up with the girls in the group and was extremely frustrated when he was unsuccessful. Consequently they all hated him an created more drama until he quit the class. Everything but ****ing doing the work in the god damn class.

My gpa does not need this :(
http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/...haelm5/pop.png

The woes of not being useless in college. You have to put up with the 99 percent who are.

GOOD TRAINING FOR LIFE!

Occupy group assignments!
Seriously. Take the middle road, folks. Don't be the leader or the follower, just do your part, and your grade will be fine.

Yeah you're totally right Freebase. It actually in a lot of ways did push me to at least try to mediate and handle frustrations with other people especially in such a serious environment for me. Been a learning experience to say the least. I bet every group assignment after this one is going to seem like a breeze by comparison.

@Engine I honestly tried. But my group members simply could not produce adequate work. I was not rude to anyone in fact everyone was incredibly rude to everyone else and I was kind of stuck in a lot of it. Man am I glad this semester is almost over going to be the biggest relief.

You never can tell. Out of all the group school assignments I've had, group projects for work, being part of particular teams in the military, it's never the same between each scenario. There's always a different dynamic... you just have to figure out how you're going work with it.
Like Engine says, do your part, but also be flexible. If the group comes off as a bunch of flailing chickens with their heads cut off and no sense of direction, they might be the kind of people that need someone to take charge and assign tasks and methods. Alternatively, there might be a group with too many chiefs, as the saying goes. (that's usually the most difficult to manage, and can lead to a lot of resentment and uncooperative people).

Ultimately, you'll do fine in school. Hopefully your grade won't be representative of the output of the whole, but if it is, that's a situation where you'll want to make sure the group is organized and getting the job done, even if it means the smartest guy has extra work-load due to fixing everyone else's mistakes. If that's the case, and you're that guy, well at least you know they'll go along with what you say, as their grade depends on it too. Then you can take the reins and make sure the boat doesn't sink with everyone on it.

Thanks that is some good advice. I tried to be the guy giving direction and got the impression that I was doing well but I did get some what distracted along the way and kind of gave up some what. As much as it sucks I guess the dysfunction of the group is partly my fault. While I may not be the worst I did have opportunities to make things easier for myself. Hmm that is probably the real reason as to why I am upset about this situation. Its not so much the failure of others but my failure to make the best of a bad situation. If I knew I was doing the best I could I would probably approach this circumstance with pride rather than frustration.

To be fair, you can't really blame yourself. It's hard enough to control one's own state of affairs much less those of others. I wouldn't think of it in terms of controlling, though, but in terms of doing what you can to ensure the success of the group.
If you devote yourself to that, people will naturally see you as a leader, even when you're not trying to be, because they know the best chance of success is following the guy who seems to care about the outcome of the project, even if he doesn't have all the ideas to put towards it.

If you're still in the project, I wouldn't worry about feeling pride in it as it is. I'd worry about getting through the tough stuff now, and being proud of the result. It's going to be frustrating, no matter what. Pain now, glory later. ;)

I guess it is hard to control the state of others but I know I have the ability to do so if I try. That is what I meant by the frustration business. I am sour because I wasn't exercising what to me is considered and adequate amount of effort. I have noticed taking some responsibility for the way things turn out and even for the way people treat you (being given bad work and having to listen to bitching and moaning about other group members for hours on end) 9 times out of 10 is worth doing even if that means accommodating the brain dead haha

Take over control, do the work, complain about the lack on contribution and get their grades lowered.

I had a group project where I did all the substantial important pieces building up a group speech for a presentation and my two other members were so stupid they kept focusing on the pictures in the slide show and didn't even finish writing their parts! So when we presented they were slow, boring and didn't do well. I spoke at the end, the last of the groups to present and I WOKE everyone up and they all paid attention. My speech was interesting, engaging and my Lecturer gave us a B- for it. So I rocked on up and told him the story and he bumped me up to B. It can be ****ing hard working with other people, particularly when you know you can do better.

I feel for you. Schools seem to think a stronger focus on group work is a good idea, and for most people it may well be. It isn't for me though, because people seem to have the illusion tht I'm a frigging genius, meaning I get to do most of the work while they sit back a bit. I don't particularly mind that though. The worst are the people that refuse to communicate. I got paired up with a girl in English not too long ago for an assignment, and trying to get any words out of her other than 'Umm...', 'Uh...' and 'Yeah...' proved to be impossible.

Took the words right out of my mouth. I really should speak to my prof though.