Uni Group work Rant

[Gman]

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

 

[Gman]

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.

 

[Gman]

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.

 

[Gman]

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