Lazy group member - let him burn?

2016BarnardMom
Thu, 05 Dec 2013 19:23:53 +0000

I’m in grad school and in my earlier classes, we had a major group project in every class. The real kicker is, they were all online courses (through a brick and mortar college). Trying to find time for people who were working full time, had families, classes, etc. to even have conference calls was a huge challenge, let alone getting a cohesive paper done. Regardless, in every single case, one or two people did most of the work, one person did an OK amount and the fourth person was a slacker- when the groups were assigned. When we got to choose our group members, one other class member and I always paired up and selected two more people who did the best work on the discussion boards that were part of class.

In one course, the groups were assigned and we had one group member who had stopped posting on discussion boards and was not responding to our emails. I emailed the professor to inquire whether he had dropped the class because there was no way for us to know. All we had was his school email address and no other way to attempt to contact him. What a fiasco. We never heard a word from him. After I asked the professor about him, the professor said he couldn’t tell me anything because of FERPA. For all we knew, the guy had died or something. It was ridiculous. The professor did institute peer reviews that could either add or subtract 10 points if your group gave you a very good or very bad rating.

Never did find out what happened to that guy.