University group work

[PhatE]

I don't know if other people have the same experiences but group work fucking blows 21" horse dick.

Fucking spastic team members who have never once in their lives used office before, created a table of contents, cover page, use libre office which breaks office compatibility with varieties of formatting and added pictures, give inconsistent fonts, no headings, margins are unaligned, 2 line paragraphs (sometimes it's in another language), don't include 3 major sections out of 4, ask what the assignments are 2 days before they're due. The list goes on!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIO-foQBedc

[BaptismByLoli]

Sounds like you love them

[PhatE]

Final year students and not once have they done any of this or been told that their work is garbage and they need to fix it.

Between the teaching staff and the students that produce this crap, it's fucked.

[BaptismByLoli]

That sounds serious .. Good luck with the final work. In my college course, we all do group work everyday so it's not that bad

[Torpid]

Yes, group work is dumb. It always means I end up doing most of the work and everyone else ends up doing barely any, at least the ones that I've had to do so far. Fortunately I haven't a group assignment that was formally marked as part of my degree I would have been raging if it was though.

[Toilailee]

Sounds like your average day at university.

[Flash]

Agreed group projects suck. So many different standards. I've been on the "your work is rubbish fix it" on all of mine expect for one. Was very weird being on the receiving end of that considering my standards are high. Most of my group projects have been in large introductory/General classes.

[PhatE]

To be fair I can understand why there are assignments that are group based. There are many instances where you will be working as a team in the workforce and you will have difficulties whilst working with some.

But how Universities translate the transition between the two is really inaccurate.

The biggest problem is that there are NO repercussions or consequences for producing trash work or failing to follow group direction or recommendations or even producing work for that matter. At a real job, you'd either be put on probation or get fired if you acted in the way that people do in group work. In group work if you don't do something then the group either wipes their ass for them or complains to the tutor to which the tutor replies with "there's nothing we can do about it".

There's nothing that Universities will do about it etiher. International students pay at least twice as much as the locals over here so to keep the University ratings up and attract more business they allow the international students to pass regardless of the complaints. Not with high marks though considering the final exam is solely individual but the fact that it allows them to get to final year and have nearly zero skills to offer a final year project really grinds my gears.

They also don't have enough staff to be able to mark x number of assignments in the 12 week period that consists of a semester. It's more efficient to assign groups to these ones so that all students get marked before the end of semester. This is due to cost savings, but that's a load of bullshit as well considering that my brother was auditing the university and can see they have squillions which is spent on new 10 story buildings. That's not a joke, in the past 4 years they've build 2 of them and they're massive.

I'll probably rant about this on stream later tonight as well. uuurrggghhh GROUP WORK!!!!

[Torpid]

[talk about group work]

There's nothing that Universities will do about it etiher. International students pay at least twice as much as the locals over here so to keep the University ratings up and attract more business they allow the international students to pass regardless of the complaints. Not with high marks though considering the final exam is solely individual but the fact that it allows them to get to final year and have nearly zero skills to offer a final year project really grinds my gears."

You mean for the course that you're taking you can get to the final year of the degree without having to do any individual-exams/essays/pieces of coursework?

Seems like a poor way of going about things to me. Here at the University of Leeds you have individual exams and assignments every 6months, so January/May. You get a grade each year and if you fail any given year you are kicked off the course. Failing the course would mean that your cumulative mark was below 40, additionally you may not fail any single module that you take as part of your course. So if you get 39 right in... Let's say Introduction to macroeconomics and 89% in your introduction to microeconomics you have failed a module and so you are not allowed to progress to year2, lose your £9000 and are kicked off the course. Note that 40 isn't exactly a percentage it's some other queer value they make up and I'm not sure how they do it as the maximum mark isn't 100. It is however very easy to keep above 40 in all the modules, although it will require at some revision at some point.

(note you are actually allowed to re-sit a certain number of failed modules each year while progressing still, but it's small, such as 1 or 2 and realistically if you couldn't do that module while you had less content to do then the chances of succeeding at the module when you have more modules that you need to succeed at overall is slim. It is for this reason that noting that you must get 40 or higher as your cumulative mark is important. If you get 40 in all modules and 39 in another you most definitely under no circumstances whatsoever can progress to year 2, i.e. you do not get a re-sit option. If you fail a re-sit module a second time then you are kicked off the course, but you would have to pay £18,000 as you just started year 2 (unless you resit a S1 module in S2).

Furthermore exams and even essay submissions (although I'm not sure how coursework would work as I have not done anything which required me to do such) are anonymised so there is no room for bias based on the type of student or anything like that. It also makes faculty/student sexual relationships more viable, I point that out because in the UK such is actually legal, which as I understand it is quite a rare thing. Also it means you tend to go to your head of school or personal tutor for post-graduate references which is good as they rarely have sat in your classes, or at least having done so for most of your classes and you won't have directly handed them your essays. They wouldn't know which essay was whose and they also wouldn't know who handed in essays late because mark penalties for late essays are deducted after a member of faculty has already marked it with the assumption that it was handed in on time by admin staff and not members of faculty.

[Flash]

Outa curiosity what's your teacher:student ratio? And that description fits most 4 year universities

[Torpid]

14.7 according to this website - http://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/leeds

Personally I've experienced lectures of up to 100 people for philosophy, up to 300 people for economics/maths.
Tutorials for philosophy usually have no more than 6 people in them. Seminars for other subjects (social policy/sociology/economics/maths) have no more than 25, but usually stick around 20.

[Commissar Vocaloid]

In one of my last university projects, working on our final year mechanical project on building a vehicle, we were writing a "passing of knowledge" to the next team that would continue working on it the following year and we were going over some of the inventory we had for parts/materials we had for carry over and we realized that one of our members (a group of 4) had not returned 2 essential parts to the vehicle. This included a roll bar and one of our performance shocks (each cost $500). He had originally taken these for making some measurements and dimensions for parts we had to make, but he never ended up returning it. The total value of the items was something like $800.00.

Group projects are awesome when everyones on the same ball, but thats rarely the case.

[Protagonist]

Group work is awesome when you get to pick who you work *with*, but when you don't get to pick *your team mates* you could end up with the misfortune of working with someone who fabricates data, misinterprets the results of the fake data(and a literature review), and then get accused of sexism because you had the audacity to call them out on their fabrication attempts.