Uni Group work Rant

Gman · 10 Feb 2006 at 20:20

Well theres a few of us on here at Uni and no doubt your all asked to do some group work as part of some assignments.

Now I understand why Uni's go down this route as in a business environment your probably going to be working as part of a coding team doing your own little thing and bring everything together.

At the moment i'm doing a masters and where doing a group work assingnment, its a website assignment involving jsp and javaBeans along with all the design work.
We decided from the start to split the work between us so one was doing the design another did the java and the other the jsp.

the the design and the javaBeans are sorted and finished but the guy doing the jsp has well and truly made a balls up on some sections and as a result not everything on the a ssignment spec has been covered. What makes it more anoying is that throughout all this time he was doing the coding he just said the normal "everythings fine etc".

Now the assignments been handed in whilst i haven't been there and like mentioned not everything was working in the jsp side, yet the implementation in java was there.

is it just me that feels that its unfair for me to lose marks due to one persons inability to put the time and effort into a piece of work? yet he'll no doubt get the marks from my section which was near perfect.

You'd think people spending about 6k on a masters degree would put the effort into to getting a top notch grade and not actiing like some freshers taking life easy.

rant over :mad:

triggerthat · 10 Feb 2006 at 20:28

Hi there,

I know how you feel exactly. "Gives a man hug". We had a Business module last semester and 3 out of the 4 worked hard. The other unfortunately was very laid back and a general BS'er. We managed to just get a 1st depsite his lact of effort.

Anyway, for another module, we've just been put into groups for some coursework, and after the first lab, only 3 of us showed up out of the 5.

Jake 2.0 · 10 Feb 2006 at 20:53

i dont think you will be marked down, as its a group coursework, he would have been expected to do some work.
did you put down who did what somewhere in the report? that should show tutors who worked and who didnt

Gman · 10 Feb 2006 at 21:24

well some time next week theres going to be a walkthrough of the assingment were we demo it to the lecturer. Here the Lecturer's going to ask use questions about the different bit so i supose he'll find out then who's done what.

But the main part of the assignment was to demonstrate how the design to linked to the coding etc and based on whats one the coding (jsp) does not match my intended design

.

The assignemnt is also split into mark sections 50% design section, 30% coding and 20 individual report.

SO basicly based on that I can kiss a large portion of the 30% codeing good bye.

Bigsy · 10 Feb 2006 at 22:40

I had nothing but trouble with group projects when I was at uni, mainly due to my m8's being totally ****.

In the 2nd year group project (8 people) 5 of the group that were very pally and decided they were going to do the project them selfs and basically excluded me and another 2, even though I was by far the best coder (if I do say so myself). As it was the other 2 were lazy gits and didn't care anyway which made my complaints to the uni fall on deaf ears. I ended up with 50% for that work, which I was not pleased about to say the least.

I personally think they should stop group projects imo, there no real reflection on the real world. All solo coding projects I had I got 1st's on including my dissertation, if the group projects I was forced to do I could have done on my own I would be sitting here now with a 1st degree and not a 2:1.

Gman · 10 Feb 2006 at 22:48

Bigsy said:
I had nothing but trouble with group projects when I was at uni, mainly due to my m8's being totally ****.

In the 2nd year group project (8 people) 5 of the group that were very pally and decided they were going to do the project them selfs and basically excluded me and another 2, even though I was by far the best coder (if I do say so myself). As it was the other 2 were lazy gits and didn't care anyway which made my complaints to the uni fall on deaf ears. I ended up with 50% for that work, which I was not pleased about to say the least.

I personally think they should stop group projects imo, there no real reflection on the real world. All solo coding projects I had I got 1st's on including my dissertation, if the group projects I was forced to do I could have done on my own I would be sitting here now with a 1st degree and not a 2:1.

Got to agree there mate, so far all my individual wrk has been high 70 mid 80 which is on for a distinction for a masters. But the other guys in the group have only been getting around the high 50's low 60's so there all just happy to scrape a pass where else i'm not. Seems if i want to get anything extra I have to do all the extra group work my self

.

I can some what understand is on an undergrad degree but for me there still acting like this doing a masters and these are 25-27 year olds who don't seem to be bothered that theve spent the best part of 6k and are happy to throw it away.

weescott · 10 Feb 2006 at 23:00

I helped a group of graduates make a presentation for "The Board" a couple of months ago. One guy seemed to do all the work. Overall it was the groups fault that were late in giving me content despite numerous reminders. Given that this was a workplace environment they were lucky. They somehow pulled everything together and with a liitle help ended up winning thier task against other graduates.

The graduates were lucky that they had good advice. At Uni you won't have that. I cam sympathise in the work inbalance but the lesson is in group co-ordination and organistation. If you document your work log properly then it will be noted who did and did not pull thier weight!

voodooflux · 10 Feb 2006 at 23:48

Bigsy said:
I personally think they should stop group projects imo, there no real reflection on the real world.

I dunno about that, reading all this reminds me of several commercial projects I've worked on over the last 15 (ish) years

Like weescott I fully sympathise (indeed empathise), but very few projects are solo endeavours from my experience - most of them are a team game. These could end up being some of the mose useful lessons you'll learn at Uni.

cheers
v.f.

richard1973 · 11 Feb 2006 at 10:30

i feel the pain too, this has just brought back some annoying memories on my MA.
one being a multimedia group work, i had previosly done a BA in a similar degree so knew Director quite well, the other students (lasses) had an art background and had no idea how to use Director. So I did all the Director application, explained to them how to use Director and did all the flow charts and navi charts. They did the report which I didn't get to see as they handed it in before I got chance as it always 'oh it's not ready to see yet' then boom its handed in. They came out with higher marks than me, b**ches! would have love to have read what they put as we never got the assignment back like you usually do, I think they picked it up and never showed me and denied getting it back too from the pick up office.

Next group assignment, similar situation but this time group of guys, design and make a website. Again I had HTML knowledge and these guys came from a different background, but they were from a programming degree's so knew programming great, but layout and design and colour awful with no clue whatsoever, the module HAD to be done in Dreamweaver so not like we could touch the code. And in a group of five with four programmers happy with the hideous looking website I just had to go 'erm yeah thats great' what I really meant was 'what the hell is this piece of crap, this is a for a masters!' Typical too, it was a module I was lookign forward to until the lecturer said 'this will be a group assignment'

No surpise, low grade! Those 2 grades made me 2 A's short of a MA with Distinction. And if they were single assignments I know I would have had a good chance of an A grade for each. I really think Uni should not have group work for important assignments, and should leave all team bonding crap to the pointless communication module we all have to sit.

It's not like we'd get to a work place and go 'oh were a team, I dunno what to do!' Team work is only good for scivers who hide amonst a group to get them through a module, only people who suffer with watered down grades are the people who do the work in team work.

Gman · 11 Feb 2006 at 12:25

voodooflux said:
I dunno about that, reading all this reminds me of several commercial projects I've worked on over the last 15 (ish) years

Like weescott I fully sympathise (indeed empathise), but very few projects are solo endeavours from my experience - most of them are a team game. These could end up being some of the mose useful lessons you'll learn at Uni.

cheers
v.f.

true but when working in teams in a business if one guy (who is vital to the completion of the project) doesn't pull his weight they'd be out of the door and another more able person drafted in. This in Uni is not possible, me i'm not at Uni doing my Msc to make friends but 'm also not there to upset people as theres more group work to come.

Hopefully i'll get the makes I deserve as my design doesn't realy relate to the jsp side just the java (which is done). but at the end of the day the assignment specs states we have to make a system that does x,y and z and when x and only part of y work it starts to look bad

.

then it comes round to getting a job and employeers start asking why such a low mark for this ? you explain it was group work and it gives them the impression your not a team player

voodooflux · 11 Feb 2006 at 12:40

Gman said:
true but when working in teams in a business if one guy (who is vital to the completion of the project) doesn't pull his weight they'd be out of the door and another more able person drafted in.

You'd be suprised at how long someone like that can be "carried along" by a team (regardless of how vital they are deemed to be). I've been fortunate to work with a lot of conscientious individuals (I'd hope to count myself among them

) who have taken on more than their share of work to compensate for such people. It's not fair, but it's a reality unfortunately.

On successful projects it's the deliverable that we've focused on, not individual performances. I guess it's a case of "get the job done then look at the team afterwards." That last bit doesn't always happen though unfortunately.

cheers
v.f.

Dave M · 11 Feb 2006 at 12:40

I didn't do too many group projects - infact I think I only did one in the whole three years of comp sci and the other members were all right.

Group work would be okay if they gave sufficient time on the time table so the 'work' was in the class room, not at home and lecturers would remove under-performing members from the group, making them do a solo project and losing the 'team work' mark.

Of course being able to identify and remove slackers would make them a manager of sorts - and the reason lecturers are in university and not the real world? Exactly.

I did have one bad project group, I did one year of chemistry before switching to comp sci - I knew I was switching and just had to finish the year so could have just jacked off and did nothing. But infact I did 90% of the work in the project, the others in the group just didn't seem to grasp the concepts nor care if they reached any conclusions.

Then, as most chemistry grads go into teaching I guess they'll fit right in

MrWhippy · 11 Feb 2006 at 21:04

to be fair, the team as a whole are/were responsible for the teams performance.
you can't really say "i did all my bit" and "someone else didn't do their bit" and expect to get full marks yourself in a team excercise.

there's a reason they make you do team excercises, it's to teach you, or at least give you an insight into the mechanics of team work.

in the real world, (assuming you go on into the industry) you're gonna find a lot of what you get taught, you rarely need to use. other things come up all the time. for most people team work is what it's all about.

in industry, most teams have a leader, and a manager. between them it is their responsibility to check that everyone is getting through there workload, and to replan/redistribute the workload when any part of the team fall behind. in the real world, things rarely go to plan and this kind of replanning goes on all the time, it's a significant part of any project. it's called project management.

ideally your team would have sussed this and either put someone in charge (a role that could have rotated) or opted for equal control. if you didn't pick a leader, you kind of opted for equal control (and equal responsibility) by default.

all that said, uni work is rarely about the finished product. more often it is about the process. plenty of people get PhDs based on experiments that didn't work as they initially wanted them to.

i shouldn't worry too much it's unlikely you'll be severely penalised for this, but in reality the group should not have just taken his word for it. you should have set deliverables which everyone had to produce along the way. and then you would have picked up on his lack of progress.

funny thing is, i had exactly the same thing happen to me, a team member at uni being very persuasive that he was on top of it, only to not turn up in the crucial last week of the assignment.

on the up side, it's exactly this kind of thing that will teach you those important lessons. learn from it, and don't be so trusting next time round. ie. ask for and provide proof of progress on team projects.