re: Let's hear some group project nightmares

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members is usually either a reflection of poor social skills or being as terrible as your "awful group partner"

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there is a lot of truth to this. if you can actually bring something to the table, you'll end up in a good group more often than not.

it's a message board

you type all your text messages the same way you type a research paper?

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You're saying the professor knew he couldn't speak English or that he was faking the dead grandmother?

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Professor knew he wasn't worth a damn, kid was the only one left without a group and the professor let him pick which group he would be in.

Friend of mine was leading her group's Senior Design project in ME.

They spent two semesters designing, fundraising, and building a machine that could read a paralyzed kid's eye movement to shoot a basketball.

One member never responded to texts/emails/calls, never attended any of their weekly meetings over a 6 month period. Did not build. Did not write any part of their report. Did not do any damn thing.

My friend kept every attempted communication including documenting when she and other group members would speak with him in person. There was always an excuse.

A week before presenting/reporting their project to the class, she informed him he would not be able to stand with the group when they presented.

Dude threw a massive shitfit, reported her to the professor for bullying/ostracizing him and basically blamed her for "intentionally cutting him out" of the project.

Instructor told my friend she had to let him stand with the group but it was her decision if she would let him speak. She spent the next week receiving abusive text messages calling her derogatory names and threatening to sabotage the presentation. She was a nervous wreck fearing this guy was about to ruin a years worth of work.

He no-showed the presentation

This one time, someone decided to put a shite load of humans on the same earth to live in harmony, but they all started killing each other all of the time over religion and money. It was terrible

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I was in a group a long time ago, and this dumb brawd lost the flash drive with our entire 50 minute long PowerPoint presentation on it. Found that out 10 minutes before we had to present

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Ouch!


I had a girl who was in charge of the flash drive just quit the class and go AWOL about a week before. I thought that was bad, but I think you got it beat.

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Not going to lie if that happened to me I'd probably record all the threats and stuff and email them in a nicely drawn up form to the teacher with lsu pd cc'd on the email

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She did... no action was taken by the instructor. I advised she notify Student Accountability but she didn't want to go through the hassle so close to graduation

ARebyou talking about educational or professional? I loved group projects in college and didn't mind doing most of the work when needed.

In the professional world, they suck because you have to beg people to give their slightest necessary input.

In college, me and another guy were in a group with 4 other girls (first mistake). It was basically a research paper...which apparently needed 5 people to do.

This project was about 20% of our grade. Our group sets up a time at the library to get together and write the paper. Before we meet up, the 4 girls get in a fight and decide that they're splitting up the group and doing separate papers. Me and the other guy are in the dark on this whole thing and the girls write their papers before we were even supposed to meet up.

Each girl texts us and tell us to not worry about the paper, they took care of it. We offered to help again, they said to not worry about it and won't accept any input from us.

One group of girls puts our names on the paper, then proceed to tell the TA when they turn the paper in, that we didn't help at all, and didn't offer to help. TA gives the girls 100/100 and gives me and the other guy a 0 because we "cheated". We try to explain what happened to him and he says that if we don't take the 0 and move on, he's going to report us to the Dean's office for cheating.

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have been amazed how kids can make it all of the way through college not knowing proper spelling, grammar, punctuation, how to use Word and Excel, or how to format reports. I think I've had probably 5 competent group partners in the last 4 years (out of maybe 30 partners). Well, competent enough that I could trust their work.

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You will be more amazed when 10 years from now you will be saying the same things about your professional co-workers. To make it worse you will also learn that some of these people will be paid more than you, and the ultimate insult will be when at some point at least one will become your manager. This opinion is based on working about 40 years in engineering and tech fields.