Thou art mine enemy
I’ve got a bone to pick with my Shakespeare professor. He’s the reason that I’m grateful the weekend is finally here.
Two words… group projects.
He’s assigned six group projects throughout the semester. My group just finished the third of six. What a headache these things are! They’re mostly just doing historical research of whatever we’re reading at the time plus a little literary analysis for good measure. My group wraps up all the information into a Power Point presentation and one of us does a 10-15 minute speach on what we’ve discovered.
This doesn’t particularly bother me except for the credit we’re actually earning for our efforts.
All of this work… all of the hours researching, sorting, arranging, and presenting is only worth 10% of my final grade. I’m gonna break it down here. Six presentations for 10% of the final grade comes out to 1.7% per presentation (and I rounded up). Today we just turned in our combined effort which ended up being an eight page paper. E-I-G-H-T pages! for 1.7% of the final grade.
“What’s the rational here?”, I ask myself. Well, perhaps this is a good thing if your group sucks. Maybe it’s a safety net for people who may get screwed in the end because of someone else. But it certainly feels like it’s a reward for the slackers, ya know? Theoretically, if I didn’t do a damn thing for the group and never turned anything in for it, I could still get a 90% in the class.
hmmmm…..
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Group projects are the worst. Remember when we were in a group in Shakespear class? We were kinda slackers. Except you had an excuse, what with the military and all. I was just lazy.
I completely empathize with your situation. Group work is terribly frustrating. Especially in situations that you end up being assigned dead beat group mates, or partners that have poor attendance.
In essence, it takes control away from the professor and dumps it into the lap of the group, expecting students to govern themselves, which is all well and good, but what happens when there is a dispute, or someone is not pulling their own weight within the group? It creates drama.
Of course none of this even touches on the issue you bring up regarding disproportionate reward for time spent. But hey, as professors love to throw in our face: it mirrors the “real world” in which we will need to learn to function in a group. Bleh.
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