|
Unless you take all your classes with friends, you will never get an entirely good group. Even then, you might just come out of it with one or two less friends. Especially if you're the lazy one.
|
#
?
May 10, 2015 22:32
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 18, 2024 00:30 |
|
|
gently caress group projects. They always gently caress you in the rear end.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2015 23:03
|
|
|
In the group department, I've only had to do one group project so far and it went really well, although it was only for a short leaflet on genetic diseases in animals. Textbook wise, we only had one required textbook that cost £60, but I got it for £40-odd because my boss is a member of the society that publishes the book. The other recommended books I got from Waterstones marketplace at dirt cheap prices. I've been lucky so far.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2015 23:33
|
|
|
If I actually cared about my grades I would probably hate group projects
|
|
#
?
May 11, 2015 18:35
|
|
|
You know what sucks more than groups projects. Online group projects during a summer session.
|
|
#
?
May 11, 2015 18:56
|
|
|
Jaramin posted:Unless you take all your classes with friends, you will never get an entirely good group. Even then, you might just come out of it with one or two less friends. Especially if you're the lazy one. This is great, if you can pick your own group members. The group projects where you can make your own groups usually turn out well as you've likely reached the point in the semester where the smart/able students know who each other are and create good groups. My experience with group work usually results in the prof breaking the class up into random groups using a class roster. When your prof assigns groups you usually end up in one of the following... (all of which I have found myself in during teacher's college). -Group made entirely of hippies who want to apply their "unique snowflake lifestyle" to their project, resulting in a thesis that has absolutely no published work on it. -Group with more than one 40+ year old bored housewife/perpetual student who bogs everything down in retarded speculation and bad ideas. -Girls who are friends and by coincidence ended up in the same group, thus continuing their clique of secrecy and overruling any common sense you try to propose. -Foreign students who have yet to realize the professor doesn't care who their dad is or how rich their family is, and is failing everything do to their lack of effort. -Almost literal retards who you can't even comprehend how they managed to make it out of high school. -Procrastinators who decide everyone can just do their own un-coordinated thing and then "we'll just staple it all together 5 minutes before it's due". -People who have their own idea what should be done and will not budge, and prevent any work from being done until they get their way. -Skippers who have attended almost no classes and have no idea what is going on. -Lazy assholes who just hope everyone else will do the work and tack their name on it. -Type-A personality who thinks they are the king of essays/projects, takes over everything, replaces other group member's work with their own, and ends up getting the entire group a mediocre grade because they have use their position as "group leader" to hijack the project and run it into a wall. * * (in this case the group "leader" collected all of our finished work, and pretty much used none of it, instead deciding it would be a great idea to just write the entire thing herself, without telling any of us. When the grade and copy of the paper came back we took it to the prof, along with print-outs of our submitted work, and the next week the prof informed us that she had been kicked out of the uni for academic dishonesty, as she had plagiarized in a previous course, and this was her final strike).
|
|
#
?
May 11, 2015 19:16
|
|
|
Jaramin posted:Unless you take all your classes with friends, you will never get an entirely good group. Even then, you might just come out of it with one or two less friends. Especially if you're the lazy one. It has to do with subjects too, I think. In my CS classes group projects were generally at least tolerable. You'd get a few lazies but late-stage CS students don't get there by being lazy and handing in poo poo. CS is loving hard and the dipshits usually wash out early before they get to group project classes like software engineering. I did a bigger share of work in that class too but the other two guys I were with at least showed up and did poo poo. In that case I ended up doing more because of my skill set; the project was related to stuff I had already been learning so I did a lot of work and taught the other dudes some stuff. That project was OK. The project I was mostly bitching about was in a low 200-level economics course. For my CS major I was required to go through the intro level stats class and holy poo poo was that class full of idiots. They were also of the "we'll all do our own thing, staple it together the morning it's due, and get a C whatever who cares" variety of group. All of them. Getting them to do anything at all was awful. I swear they were hoping I would just do the whole project to get it over with before they had to do anything.
|
|
#
?
May 11, 2015 19:31
|
|
|
/\ Teacher's college was horrible for useless people. I'd say that a good 50% of the classes were people who had BA's and realized that a BA is pretty much useless on its own.
|
|
#
?
May 11, 2015 19:46
|
|
|
There's a huge booger with a long hair stuck in it plastered just above the 2nd urinal on the third floor of the Chance Academic Center. It's been there for at least two months and I saw it for the last time this afternoon after taking my Economics final. Really put poo poo into perspective and I immediately forgot about all the petty poo poo, like the Spanish final I tanked earlier that day.
|
|
#
?
May 11, 2015 21:58
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:If you go to college in the South/Southwest/Midwest, you are going to get people like that. At the university I work at, we get an old guy with a microphone screaming at people about how they're going to hell every two or three weeks, and people putting up big, graphic signs of what are supposedly aborted fetuses. They're not. My college complaint is nothing compared to some of the poo poo you guys deal with.  I applied for my school's undergraduate summer research grant and was selected for it (hurray!). The online application said that the $3,000 would be granted as a stipend at the beginning of the summer. So naturally, I was feeling good about rent and food for the summer. After the orientation meeting yesterday, it turns out their information was "outdated" online and they've changed it so that I receive the grant money in monthly increments based on the hours I work. So though I start logging hours May 21st, I won't see anything till the end of June. You can only work limited hours at other jobs outside of the research to be able to accept the grant, so someone as literally broke as I am could have got hosed over pretty badly.
angelfisher has a new favorite as of 03:43 on May 13, 2015 |
|
#
?
May 13, 2015 03:40
|
|
|
^ I'm sorry dude  I went through something similar when I started my PhD program--I accepted a stipend that said I'd get paid on the 30th of every month. Academic year officially started on August 20th, but I had to be in town a week before that for orientation, so the only thing keeping me sane as I scraped together every last penny to move across the country and pay deposits and utilities was the thought of getting paid on August 30th. Until I got there and found out I got paid starting September 30th. Even though it was an explicit condition of my employment that I be there in mid-August.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2015 03:54
|
|
|
CrotchDropJeans posted:^ I'm sorry dude My school also had a six-week lag time, even for research positions. Last year, my roommate started research on June 15th (start of new pay period, runs 15th-15th), and didn't get paid until August 1st due to a two-week lag time between end of pay period and paycheck. It is awful, and it's awful in a way that frequently occurs during the brokest time of someone's life. Universities suck like that.
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2015 20:57
|
|
|
CrotchDropJeans posted:^ I'm sorry dude Would you also not get paid in February either?
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2015 22:48
|
|
|
CrotchDropJeans posted:^ I'm sorry dude My program is the same way (we have to be here last week of august, don't get paid until October 1st), but they're explicit about it, so it's not that big of a deal. It's also pretty much how all jobs work, in that you don't get paid the first pay period. If you start a job on Monday with a weekly paycheck, you're not getting paid until the next Friday. If you start the first week of a two week pay period, you won't get paid for four weeks, etc. It's bullshit that your program wasn't explicit about it, but you should never expect to get paid the first pay day when you start a new position.
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2015 14:18
|
|
|
My younger brother by one year just finished his Freshman year with a 4.0 in my school's Mechanical Engineering program and got a research internship with one of his professors over the summer. It's a $12 an hour, 40 hours a week type of job, plus our home is in the same town so he doesn't have to pay rent. edit: I should also mention that in Mech E you can't load up your freshman year with easy general education credits, so he was never not studying all year long He is going to live like a king this summer.
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2015 17:20
|
|
|
Hmmm yes, flaky rear end group members. Please gently caress up my GPA, fam.
|
|
#
?
May 31, 2015 02:04
|
|
|
My school has a pretty handy website set up where teachers can put up course work. When students log in all off your courses are automatically there and you can easily see assignment details, notes, messages from the teacher and even upload finished work. Turns out half my teachers would rather use a random collection of google drive, emails, paper handouts, and whatever else they feel like. It's a huge hassle to keep track of which teachers are putting things in what places and it's already led to confusion with no one in the class knowing certain assignment details.
|
|
#
?
Jun 4, 2015 06:24
|
|
|
I think the only time I ever had a group project that went well was a partner project my junior year, and I lucked out and got a partner who was actually interested in the topic at hand (it was a tree class to fulfill the one science class I needed for my non-science major). It was a semester-long project that counted for 30% of our final grade, and I could see some of the other groups falling apart by the end of it. So yeah, it can be pretty hit-or-miss, but your best bet is to try to partner up with someone who looks interested in what they are learning.
|
|
#
?
Jun 4, 2015 07:40
|
|
|
of bees posted:I think the only time I ever had a group project that went well was a partner project my junior year, and I lucked out and got a partner who was actually interested in the topic at hand (it was a tree class to fulfill the one science class I needed for my non-science major). It was a semester-long project that counted for 30% of our final grade, and I could see some of the other groups falling apart by the end of it. So yeah, it can be pretty hit-or-miss, but your best bet is to try to partner up with someone who looks interested in what they are learning. If you can get away with it that's fantastic but a lot of professors will not let you pick groups. They'll just assign groups and cram them together. It turns into kind of a lottery. It's balls awful in low-level or intro classes where you end up matched into a group of people that will mostly fail out by the end of the year. Other times you don't know anybody in the class and just kind of need to guess.
|
|
#
?
Jun 4, 2015 08:56
|
|
|
Dr_Amazing posted:My school has a pretty handy website set up where teachers can put up course work. When students log in all off your courses are automatically there and you can easily see assignment details, notes, messages from the teacher and even upload finished work. I think there's an XKCD about that.
|
|
#
?
Jun 4, 2015 23:56
|
|
|
Dr_Amazing posted:My school has a pretty handy website set up where teachers can put up course work. When students log in all off your courses are automatically there and you can easily see assignment details, notes, messages from the teacher and even upload finished work. Those sites may seem worthwhile from the students point of view but having used one from the other side I can tell you they are a loving nightmare to log in to, maintain, and just generally get to work correctly. Especially for teachers who aren't tech savvy. They are also not programmed in house, so troubleshooting any sort of issue ends up taking too long to be worth the hassle in the middle of a semester. edit for example: the one I used,Brightspace/Desire 2 Learn, had in-page email that would allow the student to email the professor directly from their course page. Pretty handy, except that it wasn't really an email client, it was some dumb internal messaging service masquerading as an email. It wouldn't send an email to the professors university email address, it would send it to some weird internal email address that would kick back a "could not deliver" if the professor didn't set it up to begin with. It also never told the instructors to set it up. This problem lasted several years until they finally paid for an upgrade. A sane solution to this would be for the upgrade to change the system to send an email to the professors university email, which is not hard at all. Instead, their fix was a poorly worded announcement at the beginning the semester to not use the email tab as an email client. Pead has a new favorite as of 00:47 on Jun 5, 2015 |
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2015 00:36
|
|
|
So I'm probably going to be the guy from the group assignment that up and disappears without contributing. Don't blame me, blame the baffling marking structure for the course that means I already have the highest grade possible (high distinction / 7.0 GPA, I have no idea what that equates to elsewhere). I feel pretty guilty, but poo poo, I got other work to do that will actually make a difference to my grade.Glasgow Kiss posted:Hmmm yes, flaky rear end group members. Sorry
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2015 01:34
|
|
|
Glasgow Kiss posted:Hmmm yes, flaky rear end group members. It's good that you learned one thing about real life in college.
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2015 02:19
|
|
|
Dr_Amazing posted:My school has a pretty handy website set up where teachers can put up course work. When students log in all off your courses are automatically there and you can easily see assignment details, notes, messages from the teacher and even upload finished work. We had this problem at my school, then decided to exacerbate it by having not one, but THREE loving LMSes (Learning Management Systems): Blackboard 8, Moodle, and Blackboard 9, then some classes using WebAssign (whose motto might as well be "Pay $50 for 10% of your grade in all your math classes!"), personal websites, email....
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2015 03:59
|
|
|
Neito posted:We had this problem at my school, then decided to exacerbate it by having not one, but THREE loving LMSes (Learning Management Systems): Blackboard 8, Moodle, and Blackboard 9, then some classes using WebAssign (whose motto might as well be "Pay $50 for 10% of your grade in all your math classes!"), personal websites, email.... One of my physics professors (EMag, because of course it's EMag) had all of the coursework hosted on a personal non-university website. Not his own - the website of another professor entirely, one who most of us had never heard of and had not taken Phys I with, and that he didn't know the URL of off the top of his head. Apparently the other professor e-mailed him reports when coursework was completed or something. I dunno, I wound up dropping the class when in the first two weeks we were taught Coulomb's Law, sat through twenty to thirty minutes of repeated failures at demonstrating formula work on the whiteboard (with the added bonus of his work being so poorly organized it was often impossible to tell where and when he'd made an error), and four and a half hours of anecdotes about the time he spent at CERN. He had to do an "emergency lesson" on Ohm's Law during the first lab session because somehow he had not managed to so much as mention it once. Or check to make sure the lab equipment was functioning and not physically broken. Or see if the worksheets he'd given us had the correct instructions for using the multimeter. Or that they did not ask us to measure distances on the Slidewire Wheatstone Bridge longer than its maximum length. Wound up dropping entirely out of that university because almost every class I took there was like that if I wasn't lucky enough to get a full-timer (and sometimes even if I was). Poli Sci professors who wanted you to repeat their political views or get points docked for "unsupported opinion", English teachers that never taught class or spent every class session preaching their hosed-up views on gender or race, etc. It was a goddamn lottery, it seemed, and if you weren't lucky enough to get one of the minority of instructors/professors that were actually decent, you were likely doomed to be in a class that had a 60%+ drop/fail rate. It's no surprise that their six-year graduation rate is around 40% in a good year, and often less.
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2015 06:09
|
|
|
Today's the presentation. Two of the guys still didn't do anything. We need their stuff to finish the powerpoint. Where do these jackasses come from?
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 20:23
|
|
|
Just make slides with their name on it and give the presentation, silently pausing on the those slides for an awkward amount of time
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 20:34
|
|
|
Lamech posted:Just make slides with their name on it and give the presentation, silently pausing on the those slides for an awkward amount of time Bwahaha. I'm strongly considering that. They said they'll be available at 1 or so, so I'm being kind and allowing them to put in their points in person. But flaky bastards, can you really trust em?
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 20:46
|
|
|
Glasgow Kiss posted:Bwahaha. I'm strongly considering that. They said they'll be available at 1 or so, so I'm being kind and allowing them to put in their points in person. The answer is no. Do the name thing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 20:54
|
|
|
Lamech posted:Just make slides with their name on it and give the presentation, silently pausing on the those slides for an awkward amount of time I endorse this suggestion because it's fab.
|
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2015 20:19
|
|
|
On the topic of group projects, I've got the marks of one assessment left, and my current marks for each module are 79, 74, a double module with 64.35, 53.5 with 25 marks remaining, and a group module with 50, totalling 385.2 out of a possible 575 marks so far. This means that if I get full marks on this last assessment I will get 69%, just short of a first for my time at uni since this is the only year that matters if you beat your second year (which I will). Without that group module, I would need to fail this final submission to not get 70%. I know maybe I shouldn't complain because I'm already sitting just on the border, but seriously gently caress group projects.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2015 01:42
|
|
|
When I was taking some 4th year business courses we had one prof who instead of having a final exam, it was all loaded onto a very large group project where we would teach the class about part of the course subject. Of course we weren't allowed to pick our own groups. Luckily when they say "You don't get to pick your work mates in real life" they also let us "fire" the unproductive group members. If you had someone who did nothing you could just let the prof know and fire them from the group. They would have to do the entire project themselves or get 0%. The best group projects I ever had were the simulations of running a grocery store, and a simulation of running a computer retailer. These simulations were literally like Sim City, complete with a top down perspective of a lovely cartoon city. You got to pick where you placed the store, where you put billboards, etc. With this simulation, every group in the class was placed in the same city, so we were all competing against each other. It was incredibly easy to win because everyone except our group decided to go into the luxury market because it had the highest profit ratio. What they didn't realize is 8 groups all competing for the smallest slice was a huge mistake. We were literally the only group who decided to make a low to moderately priced product. Our group ended up with $8 Million after the first year which put us in first place. The second place group barely made it above $500K. We wrecked the profs grading scale since he used the first place team's value as the 100% and your grade is "Your Value/First Place Value". The simulation also has a "Victory" scene which was our group buying a castle and flying a helicopter onto it. We all paid thousands to take this class.
|
|
#
?
Jun 26, 2015 15:05
|
|
|
I'm getting spam emails through my Desire2Learn account from some IQ Personality Test website. What the gently caress
|
|
#
?
Jun 28, 2015 00:31
|
|
|
ToxicSlurpee posted:It has to do with subjects too, I think. In my CS classes group projects were generally at least tolerable. You'd get a few lazies but late-stage CS students don't get there by being lazy and handing in poo poo. CS is loving hard and the dipshits usually wash out early before they get to group project classes like software engineering. I did a bigger share of work in that class too but the other two guys I were with at least showed up and did poo poo. In that case I ended up doing more because of my skill set; the project was related to stuff I had already been learning so I did a lot of work and taught the other dudes some stuff. That project was OK. I noticed the same thing in my degree. First year I wound up doing pretty much all the work for our end of year project myself since I was the only person who understood what was actually going on and everyone else was too drunk to care, whereas in third year I wound up with a group which was pretty much totally on point and everyone made valuable contributions since by then everyone had either washed out or shaped up significantly. I put this down to physics being utterly uncompromising after the first year (apparently the second year sees the greatest number of dropouts, as people who only just scraped by in first year run smack into Emag/Quantum/Solid State). I don't really have any horror stories about administrative incompetence since my department is actually pretty great, and I never had any professors who I'd say were bad at their job. Just low-level stuff like somewhat slow marking of assignments, exams etc, some variation in how well identified learning objectives were and so on. One thing I do wish though is that they'd continue the practice of giving out additional (non-assessed) problem questions in modules, as they did with several modules in the first and second years. When you've gotten to the point where syllabus material can run to hundreds of pages, and you have a grand total of 25 questions (which includes assessed problem questions and past exam papers) on which to practice your understanding of the entire module, it can make things a little dicey. Obtaining additional questions from books and other sources is always a bit of a risk because there's no guarantee that it will relate 100% to the course, and while learning it is never a bad thing, you have to prioritize getting the syllabus down first if you actually want to pass an examination. Still, it's over now, and I'm graduating this July. Just in time to get some more applications out so I can do the whole postgrad thing and expose myself to new horrors.
|
|
#
?
Jun 28, 2015 01:37
|
|
|
I'm at an academic conference at the moment. Student presentations are nothing compared to some of the lovely presentations their professors give at these things. There needs to be a conference paper/presentation Bingo card, too *Reads a wall of text off PPTs *Meaningless, unexplained illustrations on PPTs *Low-res images on the PPTs that when blown up to the size of the screen in the auditorium look like those 90s Magic Eye pictures. i spent a good five minutes squinting at one trying to figure out if I were meant to be looking at a butterfly or something *People who are so buried in their obscure research topics that no one has a clue what in the hell their presentation is on *People who do not know their audience: there are a number of independent scholars here this week, and while some are quite good, there are people who are lecturing at a junior high school level. You don't have to tell a group of professional medievalists that restaurants such as Medieval Times are NOT what it was actually like in the Middle Ages (I heard about this paper from one of my colleagues this afternoon). *People who read/mutter straight off their paper, making no eye contact at all with the audience *People who do not loving rehearse, leading to: --fumbling and stumbling through their papers --papers that run WAY over time -- you've got 20 minutes, be finished in 20 minutes. I had to race through my paper (which had been rehearsed and timed to hit the 20 minute mark) because the numpty ahead of me took 35 minutes --moderators who are too polite to tell over running speakers to arse-grab some seat I'm sure there's more, but I got to see all of these in today's panels alone. Rookie mistakes from grad students are one thing (and their supervisors should have had them better prepared), but I can't imagine what some of these people must be like in the classroom week after week.
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2015 19:01
|
|
|
Ms Boods posted:I'm at an academic conference at the moment. Student presentations are nothing compared to some of the lovely presentations their professors give at these things. There needs to be a conference paper/presentation Bingo card, too If this was late May, I'd be asking you if you happen to be in Kalamazoo, Michigan right now.
|
|
#
?
Jul 5, 2015 01:58
|
|
|
Grump posted:I'm getting spam emails through my Desire2Learn account from some IQ Personality Test website. What the gently caress My god, another person who has to use D2L. I am so sorry for you.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2015 05:01
|
|
|
I haven't had any problems with my two years so far with D2L whatsoever and I'm wondering where all the bitching about it is coming from.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2015 05:26
|
|
|
I haven't either, except for some weird formatting issues when uploading documents a few years ago but those have since been resolved. I know it's well-known how much college bookstores are a rip-off but today I was in there and I was shocked to see our Bedford Literature Anthology for $70 used when I got a copy of it off Amazon for $18 including expedited shipping what the gently caress 
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2015 21:21
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 18, 2024 00:30 |
|
|
Warmachine posted:If this was late May, I'd be asking you if you happen to be in Kalamazoo, Michigan right now. Ha ha -- Lincoln, actually. I have too many enemies among American medievalists to go to Kalamazoo, as I'd probably be arrested for assault. The Leeds IMC gets a fuckton of people dressed up in Medieval Clothing either wandering around the premises or actually attending the conference like that.
|
|
#
?
Jul 10, 2015 19:32
|
|