dippin

Ah, this should be good. At least it should give me some ideas.

The worst was when a professor was writing a book on something or other. Well, as an assignment for his class, he divided the class in groups and basically asked each group to write summaries of certain reports and part of the literature. Because I knew the "behind the scenes" goings on well, I knew that he was doing that as a way of getting someone else do the busy work for his book.

There was another one where the project itself wasn't bad, but the professor was an old bastard who would constantly hit on all the girls in class. He would say stuff like "I heard that the latest fashion is coming to school without a bra" or he would go on and on about how he hated his wife. He even asked a few girls for their phone numbers. Well, there was a group project in that class. My group was me and 2 girls. I did the bulk of the work, yet got a smaller grade than they did. Only girls got an A that class, and I ended up with an 89. As he was tenured and retiring anyways, the administration decided to just let it go and do nothing. It was a meaningless elective, so I didnt care too much either.

Now on the other side of the coin, asking students to do group projects always leads to surprising results. Some of the projects are really, really good and creative, much better than any individual paper could be. But then again, there are always situations like the one I experienced a couple of years ago. A group turned in this dreadful project. The only thing they ever cited was wikipedia (despite me telling them not to), and they didnt even format the paper. You could tell that each student wrote a section, which was loosely related to the others, and they just copied and pasted it without even formatting the whole thing. Of course, they got a bad grade, but that is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that one of the students came to complain to me about the grade. Not about the group grade, but his own. He talked about how he did not cite wikipedia (didnt cite anything else either) in the part he wrote, about how I could clearly tell which part was his because he used a different font, and then went on and on about how he didnt know his classmates' sections were oh so bad, and how he didnt even read their parts, blah blah blah. I had to remind him that throwing classmates under the bus was never good form, and if anything he had just given me all the more reason to reduce his grade, as admitting that not only he didnt have anything to do with what the rest of the group did, but that he didnt even read it was just really inappropriate.
-----Added 4/2/2009 at 11 : 55 : 41-----
This just reminded me of something that might be worth its own thread elsewhere: firefox has an addon called zotero that automatically formats citations from any page you are browsing to most styles needed.