'I went straight above him to the board of the college': College student gets ghosted by their group project peers, presents project alone out of "amusement"

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Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Oct 21, 2024 11:00 AM EDT

Group projects can be absolutely infuriating if you're doing them alone. As one commenter in this thread pointed out, some professors feel strongly that working on group projects is the closest that students can get to real-life experience. That's probably true, but it doesn't make it any less infuriating to try to coordinate schedules with three or four other busy college students. Everyone has jobs, sports, family to care for, studying, and other activities that can make it hard to find time to meet up. It often ends up with one or two of the students doing all the work, while the other two or three lounge around and ghost the group work entirely. 

This is super frustrating to the students who want to work diligently on the project. And every professor deals with this in their own way: some will punish the slackers, but others will throw up their hands and refuse to intervene. I suppose that is pretty close to real-world experience, isn't it? 

Next up, read about some job candidates who have no idea why they keep getting rejected, like one person who pushed past a random stranger, only to arrive at his interview with… that person he just shoved! 

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    Cheezburger Image 10416463360
    via CoWomen on Unsplash+

    This image is for illustration only, and the subjects are models; the image does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • 02
    Professor fails me because my group went ghost during group project.
    via u/WreckMeSenpai
  • 03
    So I was in a speech class, it was my last semester. Completely online due to COVID. Our professor assigned us a group speech that we were to record and send to him by the due date. I thought it would be easy enough as he gave us two weeks to work on it and group speeches weren't anything new to me. He even made separate discussion boards for our groups that we could use to communicate. This project was worth 30% of our grade so failing this project
    via u/WreckMeSenpai
  • 04
    meant you would pretty much fail the course. I wanted to get it done early so we wouldn't have to worry about it so I immediately post a message to everyone in the group asking when they were free to do a zoom meeting to discuss the project. No reply for a few days by any of them. I then post again. This time a little more stern as it didn't seem any of them cared enough to even reply at all. I waited a few more days.
    via u/WreckMeSenpai
  • 05
    At this point we only had a week left before it was due so I just divided up the work and posted what everyone would need to write their portion of the speech about and gave them a date/time that I would be holding a zoom meeting for the final recording to send the professor. Still no reply. It was now the day before the speech was to be recorded and two days before the speech was due and my group members had not made an attempt to make
    via u/WreckMeSenpai
  • 06
    contact in any form at all. So I did the only thing I could think of and emailed my professor explaining the situation. But I assumed he would not reply because throughout the entire semester, it took him over a week to reply to any emails I had sent him. I then did the entire group project on my own, which took me the entire night with no sleep. After I finished writing everyone's speech, It was around the time I had scheduled the
    via u/WreckMeSenpai
  • 07
    zoom meeting to record. I joined it out of amusement knowing nobody in my group would be there. Sure enough it was empty. So I did the entire speech myself. But the rubrick really put emphasis on transitioning to our other group members including saying their name. So between every section where it would cut to a different member, I would say something like, And now (My Name) will explain the importance of blah blah, then mute my screen briefly as if to
    via u/WreckMeSenpai
  • 08
    add a cut, put on a different hat, and continue the speech. I did this for all 6 portions of the speech. I turned in the speech shortly after and filled out the "Group Member Role" sheet that was due as well. I just put my name in every box that was supposed to be a different member. A week passes and I see he graded the project (Still not replying to my previous email about the situation btw.) and he
    via u/WreckMeSenpai
  • 09
    gave me a 0 stating it was supposed to be a 'group' project and me doing it solo meant I did not follow instructions. I was actually infuriated by this and knew that emailing him about the grade was as good as useless so I went straight above him to the board of the college and explained to them what happened. They apologized and said the situation would be resolved and within a few hours of me talking to the board, He had replied to my email three
    via u/WreckMeSenpai
  • 10
    times stating that he was sorry for the miscommunication about the project and that my grade would be corrected, scolded me for going above him saying "I should have just emailed him again if I couldn't get in contact with my classmates." and putting the blame on me for not 'trying harder' to reach out to them. The next semester, I saw that he was no longer with the school. My guess is that it was a habit of his to not reply to emails and he got fired for it.
    via u/WreckMeSenpai
  • 11
    Also his 'corrected' grade was a 70. But I was so mentally exhausted from the situation at that point that I didn't care to fight it anymore
    via u/WreckMeSenpai
  • 12
    tonysnark81 I once got an A on a debate...solo. My "partner" realized very quickly that debate wasn't for him, and ghosted on both me and the class, but not until the day of our first debate. I'd had zero participation from him,
    via u/WreckMeSenpai
  • 13
    so just in case, I did all of the work on our position, and on the day of, I was offered the assistance of the teacher's aide to present, but I chose to go it alone... and got an A.
    via u/WreckMeSenpai
  • 14
    [... I got a A+ for doing a group project solo once. Teacher was furious and demanded I got their grades. I had no idea college was like Highlander and you could go around abosrbing grades.
    via u/WreckMeSenpai
  • 15
    GGinNC Many professors believe that group projects are the closest you'll find to the real world. And they're probably right if they include real - world accountability. Where they go off track is when they fail to account for the fact that the individual student is paying for the class and should receive a grade based on their specific contributions and
    via u/WreckMeSenpai
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    achievements. After all, there's no such thing as a group transcript or a group. degree. It's unfair and unreasonable to punish a diligent student for the inaction of lazy students if they haven't simultaneously provided a mechanism for the diligent student to hold their lazy peers accountable.
    via u/WreckMeSenpai
  • 17
    If one person manages to produce an adequate result in spite of others not doing their part, I'd give them maximum credit. If they produce a superior result, I'd give extra credit. If they were unable to produce a viable result and could demonstrate that this was primarily because others refused to participate, I'd simply not count that assignment as part of their final grade.
    via u/WreckMeSenpai

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