wallwalker

Decided to post about this after reading an account about terrible group projects.

When I was taking classes at the Community College, I had to take Macroeconomics. Not a bad class, the professor was pretty used to the fact that most of us weren't Econ majors and used all kinds of crazy teaching methods, like rap battles on Youtube. Great guy.

He assigned us to groups of four to do a group project. At this point I don't remember what our project was about; I think he assigned topics. I know I wasn't the best of our group; I had a lot going on with Engineering classes and all, and while I did my best, I also lived a town over. But I did what I could. Two of the other ladies did a lot of meeting on campus and did a lot of the work.

Then there was the other guy.

I couldn't even remember what he looked like. This was partially because he would miss class for days; we would try to find him every class period to talk about things, and he wouldn't show up. We assigned him part of the class paper, and he did write up some short, typo-ridden sections that I had to completely rewrite. He didn't make any of the meetings for us to talk about our presentation; we tried to ask if something was going on, and he didn't answer us.

After the fifth consecutive day of him missing class, the three of us decided that he probably wouldn't show up for the presentation, either. We sent him messages, continued to try to get in touch with him and ask what was up, but at the same time we took the presentation topics we'd assigned him and started redistributing them. We had more meetings to practice presenting, none of which he attended. We were ready to do the presentation without him.

We were surprised to see him show up to class. We weren't surprised that his "presentation" was just him reading what we'd written off of the Powerpoint slides.

I don't know if he passed the class or not. The professor did ask us for input on how well the other members of the group contributed, and the three of us who actually did work panned him pretty thoroughly. I just... we did our best to keep him in the loop, and told him that if there was a problem he could talk to us and we'd do what we could to help. I'm still wondering what in the world happened.

(I'm not sure if this is better or worse than what happened to one of the students in my Engineering class - the one who was in a group of three people, but had the other two vanish and not tell him anything, to the point that he basically could only give a third of their presentation because he didn't even know what the other two had planned to say.)