Group Work projects and accepting responsibility
 

okay.. i rarely rant.. but im soo upset right now i literally have the shakes.

A little backstory:
I'm taking a beginning Visual Basic course at school right now for fun. I'm paying out of pocket for this class, and it won't affect my GPA at all.. since I already have my BS. Since im paying for this class with my hard earned money (I work at the school for a measly 6 dollars an hour, and my class costs 600 bucks + the price of books), I expect to learn something. I learned my way around the VB interface somewhat, and it really helped strengthen my programming logic and it was kinda fun too.. VB is fairly easy.


About mid March we get this assignment to work on a simple student registration program, coupled with an administrators program to enter courses into a file. At that point we hadn't learned even how to do arrays, so all the information we needed to do the project was new material. The next week we get to pick out groups to work with. Since i don't know anyone in the class I just signed the group sheet first and let anyone who wanted to work with me sign the sheet. (MISTAKE #1 ) Needless to say.. while other kids were working together.. I had a group of 1 other member. This kid seemed okay, I sat by him in lab all semester and helped him on some of his labs from time to time. We have milestone points in the project we have to check off with the teacher. The first 2 didnt require any actual work.. make some forms and do some psuedocode. Milestone #3 (whjich is due tomorrow) is present a working version of the project to the class.

Up until sunday 4/26 I hadn't seen ANY of the code from my team member. I had been asking him for a week and a half to show something and all he had was bullshit excuses. Me panicing because he was responsible for 1/2 the project.. I did what any reasonable person would do. I went and told the Professor :D. Her reply was " Be stern with him, make him work!" Oookay Lady.. thank's for all your help. Now he whipped the code up in 2 days and it works .. it's ugly and uncommented, but works.. My part is still in the dark for a few functions. I ask him to meet to help me figure out what im doing wrong and he starts laying into me.


Excerpt from an actual email

To which i replied:
To which he replies

So my question for you guys is.. Who is in the wrong here? How would you handle this? Also.. please post some of your groupwork horror stories.. It would really cheer me up :(

damn--you got a bad partner.

since this isn't kindergarten, i suppose it wouldn't be tattling to write a note to the professor when you turn in the project, explaining carefully which parts of the project are yours, which are your partner's, and the problem you were having. since your partner's code is uncommented spaghetti, and since the code is more important than the result, i have a feeling you will be okay.

Re: Group Work projects and accepting responsibility
 

I gotta tell you if I was in the same shoes I'd just turn in the project, best I could, wothout alerting the prof. Its not going to effect you, you are not concerned grade wise, and you kinda got out of the course what you wanted from it: knowledge. So instead of screw the other guy, I'd just swallow and take the result. Don't get me wrong, he deserves it, but its my nature to let it go and figure he'll get his in some other place and time.

BUT, your not me and rsl12 has a valid point. I know that most professors who assign groupwork have problems like this every semester. Its gonna happen that one person is like the idiot you got. So don't feel like you are doing something that would reflect poorly on you if you do notify the prof. Finally, I've taken classes where the group can "fire" an individual from the group: its in the syllabus. So, profs know guys like him exist, you'll get heard.

Let us know how it works out.

well, you've already gone to the prof, nothing that can be done about that. it looks like the situation has gone sour. his comments in the last letter seemed really hostile - my suggestion would be to just lower your head and charge into this thing as hard as you can... crank through it real quick and get your side of the equation done so you guys can go through and streamline it. after that step is complete, take him out for a beer and level with him that you were just frustrated that you didn't see any real contribution until the last minute. now that things are finally coming together (buggy as they may be) you guys will have a chance to interact without sitting in front of a computer screen. once it's water under the bridge, both of you should hunker down in front of your computers and piece it all together into something that not only works, but will garner a decent grade. i'm in the same situation at work in a way, and the only way to get out of it is just to prove that you can do your shit and make things happen. let me know how it worked out.

UPDATE:

Ok i talked to him the day before yesterday (4/30) and we talked for 2 hours about how upset we were.. Appearently.. he doens't like it in this country so much. He can't go home this summer because of the whole 9/11 "we're not gonna let you get back in the country" thing.. and his english is not great. He just keeps to himself and doesnt ask a qwuestioin unless he absolutely cnat figure it out. Plus.. he likes to smoke the weed, and this simply wasn't important enough for him to get involved in because he could do the code easily. At this time yesterday after our presentation..(which i did all the speaking for) i had my stuff 99% done, while his needed some tweaking. We had to turn in group evaluations and I read his. It wasnt so bad. Mine was kinda rough though.. I have a hard time forgiving a hell of a lot of vagueness because you are high, and a jackass.

I dont think we'll have any more problems.. The project will be turned in in about 4 hours, and i'll never have to see him again.
I'll have the pointless executables available for download if anyone is interested.