Which one were/are you in group projects?

SBmini · March 2014

Bradley Cooper 100%

WinstonsGirl · March 2014

Cooper. Letting down my parents by not doing well was a huge fear for me growing up, cos they had such high expectations for me.

HisGirlFriday13 · March 2014

I don't recognise any of those people. but I am the person on the far left -- I always did 99% of the work.

pumpkinsandturkeys · March 2014

BC. I'm a self-admitted control freak.

pinkcow13 · March 2014

I'm also the guy on the left. I'm just too paranoid to trust someone else with my grade. Plus, I don't want others thinking I'm THAT guy. So far though, I have been pretty lucky for the most part in terms of group projects both at school and at work. I have definitely heard some horror stories, though.

@hisgirlfriday13 - that pic is from the movie the Hangover

garnetandgold60 · March 2014

Far left. I loathed group projects, I always got put with the kids who did nothing "in order to motivate them." Um, no. You put me there to boost their grade.

Funny-ish story, when I was in 12th grade and in my AP Literature class we had a group project and, of course, I got put with the lazy kids in the class. I was an uber-nerd and everyone knew I'd work my butt off to get a perfect grade, but I'd had enough of the grade moochers at this point (already accepted to college).

After trying to get them to work for about a week I finally sat back and said, "Y'all do the work. I have a 110 in this class and even if I fail with a 0 I'll still have an A or A+." They all tried to get me to call my bluff and do all the work but I refused and we pretty much failed the project...I still had an A in the class. Not entirely proud, but hey, I finally grew a pair after years of doing ALL the projects for the group.

Maggie0829 · March 2014

I would say that I did about 75% of the work (so close to Cooper). More then my share but certainly not all of it. But I definitely got pissed when people slacked off.

KeptInStitches · March 2014

99% of the work. Except it was actually 100% of the work.

HisGirlFriday13 · March 2014

I have never seen any of the Hangover movies.

I'm generally kind of pop-culturally clueless.

DH realised the other night that I have never seen any of the 'Back to the Future' movies the whole way through, and I've never seen enough of them to put together any major plot points other than it's about time travel.

SBmini · March 2014

Klc09d said:

Far left. I loathed group projects, I always got put with the kids who did nothing "in order to motivate them." Um, no. You put me there to boost their grade.

Funny-ish story, when I was in 12th grade and in my AP Literature class we had a group project and, of course, I got put with the lazy kids in the class. I was an uber-nerd and everyone knew I'd work my butt off to get a perfect grade, but I'd had enough of the grade moochers at this point (already accepted to college).

After trying to get them to work for about a week I finally sat back and said, "Y'all do the work. I have a 110 in this class and even if I fail with a 0 I'll still have an A or A+." They all tried to get me to call my bluff and do all the work but I refused and we pretty much failed the project...I still had an A in the class. Not entirely proud, but hey, I finally grew a pair after years of doing ALL the projects for the group.

That's brilliant! When I was in college, I was so frustrated that in one group NO ONE was doing anything but me. Same situation- they just assumed I'd do the work, so they put in the bare minimum. The day before the project was due, I got frustrated so I posted on Facebook "Debating whether or not I should throw my dead beat group members under the bus or not".

Well... I forgot that I was friends with that professor on Facebook. He replied, "Throw them under the bus." So that's what I did. I got an A, they both got Cs.

AprilH81 · March 2014

I usually did more than my fare share but not 99%.

Group papers were the worst because everyone had different writing styles. I always volunteered to do the final version of the paper because I didn't trust people to actually READ through it and make sure we all didn't use the same quote from an article in four different parts of the paper. I made sure all of the verb tenses agreed and all of that fun stuff.

garnetandgold60 · March 2014

SBmini said:

Klc09d said:

Far left. I loathed group projects, I always got put with the kids who did nothing "in order to motivate them." Um, no. You put me there to boost their grade.

Funny-ish story, when I was in 12th grade and in my AP Literature class we had a group project and, of course, I got put with the lazy kids in the class. I was an uber-nerd and everyone knew I'd work my butt off to get a perfect grade, but I'd had enough of the grade moochers at this point (already accepted to college).

After trying to get them to work for about a week I finally sat back and said, "Y'all do the work. I have a 110 in this class and even if I fail with a 0 I'll still have an A or A+." They all tried to get me to call my bluff and do all the work but I refused and we pretty much failed the project...I still had an A in the class. Not entirely proud, but hey, I finally grew a pair after years of doing ALL the projects for the group.

That's brilliant! When I was in college, I was so frustrated that in one group NO ONE was doing anything but me. Same situation- they just assumed I'd do the work, so they put in the bare minimum. The day before the project was due, I got frustrated so I posted on Facebook "Debating whether or not I should throw my dead beat group members under the bus or not".

Well... I forgot that I was friends with that professor on Facebook. He replied, "Throw them under the bus." So that's what I did. I got an A, they both got Cs.

High five to that professor! I only had one teacher/professor like that and I adored her, she had us grade each other and the group as a whole on group projects so we could (privately) throw the other members under the bus if they deserved it. Sadly this teacher in my story wasn't as awesome and so I just refused to pick up the slack.

phira · March 2014

I'm another person who didn't do ALL the work, but did feel like I was doing more than my fair share. With group papers, I was always editing other people's writing (and no one edited mine). I also nearly always ended up organizing everyone.

The one time I didn't end up being in charge of organization was in a community health course where the three people I was randomly assigned to work with were friends who were sophomores (I was a senior). They basically shut me out of the whole project except for the part of the presentation that was assigned to me. Needless to say, the presentation was a mess.

afox007 · March 2014

I end up doing 99% of the work. Last semester we had to write an essay as a group. The day before the rough draft was due I was the only one who had my section done, so I wrote the other three sections. The rest of my group tweaked what I had written just enough that they could claim they did something.

emmyg65 · March 2014

Not 99% because bitch, please. But usually, I'm the one on the outside pulling strings and silently encouraging/tricking people to do their share. So like 75% of the work.

The incessant group projects were one of the (many, many) reasons I dropped out of business school.

ElcaB · March 2014

I'm more Bradley Cooper than Bradley Cooper is.

A) I didn't trust the others' performances to meet my expectations.

I was --- okay, am ---- a bit of a control freak.

C) Either no one else cared enough to do the work or they'd turn in work with paragraphs reading things like, "Their was a deep concern for the reputation of the political officer."

emmaaa · March 2014

Definitely Bradley Cooper. I am too controlling and would rather just do the whole thing than it be done wrong or poorly.

Sadly, with the job I have now, I have been told I need to learn to delegate because I'll burn myself out.

JCbride2015 · March 2014

ElcaB said:

I'm more Bradley Cooper than Bradley Cooper is.

A) I didn't trust the others' performances to meet my expectations.
I was --- okay, am ---- a bit of a control freak.
C) Either no one else cared enough to do the work or they'd turn in work with paragraphs reading things like, "Their was a deep concern for the reputation of the political officer."

So much this. I'm a huge perfectionist and I've had so many experiences where a deadbeat group member dropped the ball. After a while I stopped trusting that anyone else would do it.

I'm in this situation right now with a girl at school. Bitch please-- it's an Ivy League law school, you can't just say you had "tummy problems" as an excuse for being ten minutes late to every meeting. That stopped flying in about 6th grade. She completely messed up a simulation we did, but at least it was videotaped, so I'm pretty sure our profs will be able to tell I was prepared and she wasn't.

Can you tell this topic is, um, timely for me right now? I'm so over this.

YourDogDontKnowSit · March 2014

75-100% according to the participation of the other members. If someone actually tried to help then I didn't stop them, but usually their contribution was slight and even more often there wasn't even an attempt.

My first year of college I had a huge quarter long psychology project that involved me and four other girls. One girl met with me a time or two and even drove us to Kinko's to get a lot of our presentation printed, but she was drunk and on pills at the time (I obviously didn't know that prior to getting in the car with her) and I saw my life flash before my eyes so I wouldn't call her a "good" partner. The other girl had her dad call me up and cuss me out because I kept trying to get ahold of her to meet up and work. The last girl told me she didn't have time to work on the project because she was trying to find a job. I e-mailed my teacher repeatedly throughout the weeks to keep her in the loop but she didn't have a lot of guidance other than keep asking the girls to meet. They never did.

So presentation came and me and the drunk/high girl stood up to present. When the other two stood up to come with us I looked dead at them in front of the whole lecture class and said, "y'all can sit your lazy asses back down, you didn't do anything and you're not presenting with us." Their names were on no project or presentation materials.

Not my best moment perhaps, but damn it felt good.

CMGragain · March 2014

I didn't see the movie, but people always wanted on my team because they figured that I would do the work and they would get a good grade for it. :-( Some teachers saw past that.

SBmini · March 2014

Haha, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that most of the ladies on a forum dedicated to planning would be the type A overachievers!

LadyMillil · March 2014

I was in an undergrad program where everyone was a type A overachiever. All the projects contained x times more work than was necessary to get an A+. Usually "x" was the number of people in the group, but every once in awhile there was someone that did the disappearing/reappearing thing.

Sugargirl1019 · March 2014

AprilH81 said:
I usually did more than my fare share but not 99%.

Group papers were the worst because everyone had different writing styles. I always volunteered to do the final version of the paper because I didn't trust people to actually READ through it and make sure we all didn't use the same quote from an article in four different parts of the paper. I made sure all of the verb tenses agreed and all of that fun stuff.

This.

doeydo · March 2014

Bradley Cooper

pinkshorts27 · March 2014

HS-usually 50/50 with one other person (went to private school)

Undergraduate- Cooper

Graduate school-I pull my weight, most do (Stanford graduate students)

JaniV123 · March 2014

Unless my group are my friends (we are al hard workers and over achievers in some ways, so we each do our share and know the others will do their share) then i take charge and try to do 95-99% of the work to insure i get an A and it gets done correctly

KPBM89 · March 2014

I always did 99% of the work in college because I always naturally took the lead and wouldn't trust anyone to screw up my grade, but in HS I was in AP/honors classes so I'd say we each generally pulled equal weight. Luckily in college, both our communications department (my major) and our business dept (my minor) had the same process for evaluating group project grades: they allowed us to turn in private evaluations of each members' efforts before they would give us a final grade. This came in handy during my marketing course and my advertising course A LOT. I'm one of those people who never got anything but an A in school and the first time I got a B+ on my report card in 7th grade, I cried. I remember the class, the teacher, the marking period, and the look on my mom's face when she saw it (upset that I didn't get an A, even though my older brother was a C student at best, but also trying to hold back her laughter at me for crying). Control freak? Check.

FiancB · March 2014

Ugh I hate group projects so much. This is what happens in group projects:

Teacher assign project.

Group stares at each other for a while

My introverted self asks what other people want to do.

Group stares at each other some more.

I sigh and resign myself to doing all the work. Again.

I had a big project in an equine business management class where we had to come up with a legitimate business plan where it would turn a profit within 5 years, show our designs, etc as though we were going to present it to the bank to ask for a loan.

The other two members of my group absolutely refused to show up to any agreed meeting times outside of class citing they were too busy (so when it's individual homework you tell the teacher you were too busy to do it??? No I didn't think so). I did nearly all of it myself, communicating the problems with the teacher the whole time and still ended up with a C, which they naturally bitched about. Ugh I'm STILL angry about that!

Side note, people tell FI he looks like Bradley Cooper all the time. I see it a little, but more Liev Schrieber.