I know that most of my readers are students or young employees working in the IT industry. I am pretty sure you guys frequently work in groups before. I have a question to ask you lots. The title says it all. This has always been a mystery to me since I never know how to handle shitty group members properly and would love to know your opinion on this.
I always ended up working on my own at the end of the day. I absolutely hate it if we manage to get an A on a project and all of them will get an A even though they do not deserve it and I was the only one working hard on it! I deserve the A because I work on it ALONE. You bitches should settle down with a fucking D.
For this semester, I work with 3 groups. I am only satisfied with one group project. I was quite annoyed with the other 2 group projects.
I was working with Madama Lazy on a project. Madama Lazy was helpful initially but towards the end, she ended up leaving all the work to me. Was she busy with other courses? Well, she was wasting her time all day long watching football.. or was it.. cricket? That was one day before the project was due! I saw her Facebook statuses! All she did was putting up statuses about the game! After I put up a status about the project being in an ‘almost finish’ progress, she sent me a message asking if she could help. Are you fucking kidding me? Don’t bother because I am almost done with it anyway. I asked her to proof read some stuff and she didn’t even do it properly. We aced this one though.
The second group was with Mr. Stupid, Mr. Lazy and Madama Moron. This is a long story. It should be in another post on its own. We ended up acing the project though. Again, it was my work. All of it!
What I can’t do (even though I really want to):
- Bitch slap them.
- Swearing profusely in front of them. (Confronting them directly doesn’t work, btw)
- Tell the professor because it will affect the group. He/she will have a rough idea on the team’s attitude and penalize all of us. I don’t want this to happen. (I am not sure how true this is. One of the seniors told me that it is better for me to shut my mouth. Maybe this is a shit advice. Not sure!)
Group works are always going to hunt my ass even though I hate it. No, it is not because I am not a team player. I am! Most of the people that I work with aren’t. So please, enlighten me with your wisdom!
Ok, this is something that will happen OFTEN in Uni because there are many who likes to piggyback on you. You have no choice but make sure they contribute by confronting them and give them a piece of your mind but then again it may just fall into deaf ears. So bear with it ‘cos I don’t think you have much choice unless you’re willing to spill the beans & tell the Professors your problem. And I assure you most Professors are aware of this problem and they’re just ‘playing’ blind because you’re supposed to work out your team problems yourself amongst each other so this is supposed to be the training for ‘team synergy’ or they say but who cares anyway – once you start working – again there are lazy bitches and bastards who’d like to throw their responsibilities at you. This time you can actually do 2 things.. One, confront them and tell them to do their shit or like me be a merciless bitch and go straight to the boss and tell him to please instruct these lazy pple to do their job because they may not listen to you but prefer to listen to the boss. But so far at my current organization that I work in for the past 4 years, I have not met any whores/bastards who don’t do their job because we’re given specific projects to work individually on
As-salam sha…
Tak boleh ke kalau
1. ko repot kat lecturer.. ok, katekan la lecturer x amek kesah..
then
2. klu kitorang, sape yg tak buat keje, memang kitorg x letak nama orang tu dalam report.. nanti, kalau lecturer perasan, dia akan panggil kitorg explain kenape macam tu.. dari situ boleh la draw attention lecturer tu daripada dia dok buat bodoh je..
tapi, sebelom nak buat ni, kitorg akan tanya budak tu dulu, dia nak buat keje dia ke tak.. klu dia nak buat , nama dia ade dalam report.. Klu dia malas, bagitau yg nama dia tak akan ada dalam report tu.. then tengok la progress dia macam mane.. klu dia maseh mcm tu, bye2 jelah..
nampak macam kejam gak la.. sebab tu kita kena tanya budak tu dulu.. (tanya tu ngan nada yg serius) .. klu buat macam tu, at least bukak mata sket la sapa2 yg ngade2 nak buat prangai tu..
Harap ia membantu ^_^v
Professors aren’t known to be very receptive to these sort of issues. They know that it exists, but they often have enough people chasing after them and enough work to do.
My advice is to next time, confront your group members first. If they hate you and don’t want to cooperate, then confront the TA. The TAs are much closer to you than the professors in most cases, and much more receptive to student input. If you can prove that you did all the work and that everybody was completely uncooperative, then the TA might just fail the rest of them.
In between projects, relish the fact that these freeloaders are just going to screw themselves over in the future (because they didn’t learn anything) and that you’re going to come out on top.
My school fortunately has this thing called peer reviews which sort of prevent this from happening. All group members get evaluated by their teammates two times, midway through the project, and after. If any team members slack off or don’t do their work they get docked harshly by their peers and the professor will have a talk with them + their grades are affected.
At work, we usually recruit the brightest students so this often doesn’t come up.
We have peer reviews but only for certain projects. Trust me, if I have peer reviews for all my project, I’ll be giving myself 100% while the others a 0%. I don’t have any tolerance for irresponsible people.
Sometimes it depends on the professor. For my first two group projects, my group did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. I did all the work, and I got so stressed that I went to the professor. They were understandable, and changed the groups around.
But even in the second group, one person NEVER works =__=
I think it’s too late to complain, so I just get along with it, and do almost all the work myself. The shittiest part is when they DO get *some* work done, but the quality is so bad that you have to redo the whole goddamn thing anyways.
The comments above covered most of my thoughts when I first read this rant.
My college also has the bureaucratic process of peer reviews in most projects. I agree, it’s always great to have hard-working team members, as they deliver high quality work way ahead of the deadline.
However, working with less-capable team members should be seen as an opportunity to grow your leadership skills, or more appropriately, your ‘people’ skills. College is the best place and time to experience this, as you don’t want to lose control at others when you start work and ending up losing your job.
Back to ‘people’ skills, the keyword here is to ‘engage’ your team members (‘confronting’ doesn’t quite cut it). Bear in mind that people have different strengths and weaknesses and hence group work should be divided based on that. If a team member is inept in doing calculations, I’d make him/her do literature review or write the report, as an example.
Also, ‘family commitments’-type of excuses are bound to come up and unless you know your team mates really well, that excuse is good for shopping for all s/he cares. In case such commitment arises, have a team member (hopefully not you) to cover temporarily and double his or her work afterwards to be fair to everyone.
I could go on and on but the wisdom here is to inspire your teammates to meet your standards to the best of their abilities by creating such atmosphere between team members. I know all you care right now is to get A’s with the least time lost, but not everyone is the same and they sure can’t know what you expect of them unless you sit down with each team member and talk to them.
It takes time (and patience) to nurture these skills, and can be very rewarding once you get the hang of it. Swearing profusely at these people is really unnecessary and will only add up to the pile of stress.
If all goes south, relish the fact you’re going somewhere with your hard work.
I. Hate. Group work. It’s the absolute worst. I don’t know if I’ve ever enjoyed a group project. I always end up doing the whole thing or am pushed into doing something stupid that I don’t agree with because all the other idiots in my group think they know what they’re doing. I actually have a horrible group assignment right now. I have to build a racecar for Physics, and no one in my group is taking any initiative. None of us know what we’re doing, and I feel like they’re leaning on me to figure it all out. I actually don’t even know two of the people in my group, and the one group mate I do know told me not to expect one of the other two to do anything. I’m supposed to accept that? That’s so not fair. Why should we do everything and she get the same grade?
Ugh, I could rant about how much I hate group work all day.
Ugh, I swear group projects will be the death of me. Most of the time when given an assignment if the teacher says the assignment is optional to work alone or in a group, I automatically sign off as alone. Pretty much for the reason you just listed… I think the group has the mentality that if they don’t do it, someone in the group will step up and do all the work for them so they still get a good grade but didn’t have to do anything. Especially if you’re known for being bright in class, they’ll “offer” assistance but always bring up some excuse for not doing it. It really does suck and it makes me cringe every time I hear the word “group project”. Sometimes I would like the extra hand but what for when I can do it better myself anyways.
yep, been there…for almost all group projects. I dislike group projects soooo much! I never came up with the solution though so I cant help =( Most of the time I get morons in my group so its better that I do everything anyways (i’m mean, but I’m also realistic).
I’ve never heard of telling the professor will cause your whole group including yourself to be penalized, but it’s better not to risk it. Good luck though, just think EVEN if they did their part…it wouldnt have been as awesome if you did it all
lol
I wish I knew — I never found a good way to deal with it. The only group work I ever enjoyed was when our group got together on our own rather than being assigned. I always just bit the bullet and did all the work on my own and stayed bitter about it