Student Maliciously Complies And Gets His Professor Into Trouble After Receiving A Zero On A Group Project He Had To Do All By Himself
Even though it is primarily thought that any learning institution is there to teach young minds things that they will later need in their careers, it also prepares them for various life scenarios. So sometimes it might seem that professors bother students with unnecessary and annoying tasks when in fact, these tasks very often show how the real life works. At least that’s what happened to Reddit user @WreckMeSenpai, who found a clever way out of a not-so-pleasant situation and now decided to share his experience with others online.
More Info: Reddit
Very often, group projects raise alarm among students as it usually means that someone will have to do more than the other
Image credits: Fabrice Florin (not the actual photo)
The user started his story by sharing that his professor from a speech class decided to split students into groups and asked them to record their prepared speech that they would have to send over to him as the class was held online due to the pandemic. For this group project, the professor gave 2 weeks. The narrator didn’t worry and thought that this would be enough time to prepare the task.
At least that was the situation this Reddit user found himself trying to work with assigned group mates
Image credits: WreckMeSenpai
Since the project was worth 30% of their final grade, the student didn’t wait and messaged his group mates about when they could all start their work. However, he didn’t receive a reply for a couple of days. After being treated with silence, the narrator tried to reach out to the group once again but didn’t receive any response. The student had waited long enough, so at this point they only had a week until the project had to be finished. This made the user divide the workload and assign everyone their part so that after they were finished with their individual parts, they could record the speech.
Image credits: WreckMeSenpai
Despite the student trying to reach out to others from his group, he was ghosted by them for weeks
Image credits: WreckMeSenpai
After he notified everyone about their work and upcoming steps, still no one from the group made an effort to even reply to these messages. The absurdity of this situation encouraged the narrator to contact their professor and notify him about the current circumstances. The student already knew that the professor was known for his inability to reply in time, but decided to go through with it anyway.
Image credits: WreckMeSenpai
After multiple attempts, the student decided to contact the professor and warn him about the situation
Image credits: WreckMeSenpai
Since he didn’t get any reply or help from neither his group nor the professor, he decided to do the whole project by himself. He gave up a whole night’s sleep to write everyone’s parts, which he later also recorded. From the way the project was presented, it was clear that the abandoned student did everything by himself. Despite his clever and time-consuming way to finish the project, the professor gave the student 0, saying that he misinterpreted the task.
Sine he didn’t receive a reply from the professor either, the student decided to do the assignment all by himself
Image credits: WreckMeSenpai
The student’s efforts were evaluated by giving him a 0, which made him extremely upset
Image credits: WreckMeSenpai
This made the narrator extremely furious as he didn’t get any reply from the professor and now was given 0 for the group project he had to do all by himself. The student didn’t want to leave things this way, so he contacted the college board and presented them with the situation he was in. This resulted in the professor finally replying to his emails and changing his results from 0 to 70. However, the professor still had the guts to blame the student for not trying harder to reach him or other students.
Image credits: WreckMeSenpai
After the user took matters further, his evaluation was changed to 70 and a rant from the professor followed
Image credits: WreckMeSenpai
The user finished his story saying that the next semester he hadn’t seen the professor, guessing that he must have been laid off of work because of him ignoring students’ emails. The student also pointed out that he wasn’t happy about the results he received but having in mind the whole tirade he had to go through, he was happy that it ended.
Image credits: WreckMeSenpai
This story also encouraged others online to share their experience of having to work in groups. A lot of people agreed that it is really hard to work with students who don’t put in their own work or vanish as soon as possible, leaving their responsibilities behind.
Have you had similar experiences? Don’t forget to leave your thoughts in the comments down below!
This situation made people online remember times when they had to deal with group projects and how bad this experience was
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Share on FacebookCollege teachers seem to enjoy punishing their students for no reason other than feeling superior. When I did my last thesis for my second master my teacher barely gave us any corrections at all for months (and the ones done were just proof that her english wasnt sufficient like not understandingpassive sentences). She waited until the last version and then failed me and my colleague "because I dont like the statistical analysis you did". The analysis was planned and explained since the beggining. She just waited to fail us on purpose. I told her that if she did not acept it I would go to the board and she immediately acepted my thesis. What a f*****g asshole.
Collage is treated very differently than public school. Ideally a situation like the one laid out by the OP would actually go to small claims asking for the grade to be dropped and the class to be refunded plus some for time and legal fees. People forget that higher education is business. Obviously this is a "what I know now" thing. I totally got the wrong end of at least one professor while in school too.
Load More Replies...It infuriates me when people give you the "you didnt try hard enough contacting X" and X refuses to respond. This happens at work all the time. It's not my job to make people do theirs. And why am I getting yelled at for doing my job when the other person isn't doing theirs at all?
It's professional gaslighting. Throw the blame on the maligned in order to avoid having to answer for your own incompetence. I see it a lot in business as well. And universities these days are the ultimate hybrid bureaucratic/capitalistic business model--especially state/public institutions.
Load More Replies...I had a classmate that did this to me. She thought she was going to ride it out. I gave her an outline that was very vague on purpose. If she did the reading and her part, it would go smoothly. One day until our oral presentation and still nothing. I approached the professor and he said I do my part and don't help her during the presentation and don't tell her what grade I got. After she floundered and failed at properly presenting her part, he gave us our grading sheets folded up. She came to me after class and said "He gave us a C on that! Can you believe it?" I said "Yeah it sucks." I got an A.
The sad part is, those kinds of people coast through life, using others as stepping stones in order to get the nice, cozy titles and pay, and each time they succeed, it only reinforces the behavior. Running our business, I live by a professional credo: "Reward the positive behavior, punish the negative."--because, while it seems almost sophomorically simple, it's allowing people to get away with bad behavior that helps to reinforce that behavior--and most employers don't have enough of an interpersonal pulse on their enterprises to nip small issues in the bud before they become big issues. That's how work spaces become toxic--because there are always people like you're describing, and many are really good at representing themselves to management as effective and hard-working when, many times, they are the opposite. In my mind, if they are caught and penalized for that kind of behavior, it's also going to renew faith in my better workers that I'm committed to fairness.
Load More Replies...I am dealing with this type of apathy with my medical “provider” it’s frustrating, infuriating and bullshit. This last Monday I dropped the civil tone I had for the last four months and lit into him. It took 24 hours to get done something requested last October. Good thing these assholes dong work for a fire department
That is especially true if you are a woman dealing with professionals. The way many professionals (especially in medicine) dismiss women and their concerns is absolutely stunning. Then when a woman goes into a talk with a lot of knowledge and the assertive tone of a man, she's called every misogynistic name in the book. Women can't win in a patriarchal world. There are no work-arounds for chauvinism.
Load More Replies...That one comment though: "I had no idea college was like Highlander where you could do round absorbing grades." 😆
One more thing to try in situations like this: CC the professor on your emails to the group members. That way, you aren't wasting your time writing extra emails that the prof will never answer, but they can't claim you didn't inform them of the problem. (Don't do this as a standard practice for all group projects, though--it's extremely irritating for a professor who *is* trying to keep up with their email, and makes you look like a narc to the other students. This technique is only for situations where you have the double-whammy of recalcitrant group members *and* a professor who doesn't answer emails.)
Also, while I'm handing out free advice: if you're reporting a concern about lazy group-mates or a professor who doesn't answer emails, *be specific* about what you have tried and when you tried it. Both of these are extremely common complaints; sometimes it's a real problem that requires intervention, and sometimes it's a person with unrealistic expectations about response times, who just needs to wait a few hours. If you want something to be done about it, provide enough details that the person you're complaining to can make an independent assessment of which kind it is.
Load More Replies...Group projects are the devil. I hated them. My student employees are always recounting the h3ll they go through. One kid, though, got some karma. after being the worst slacker in a group of 5, where two people ended up doing all the work, he then became Mr Autonomous and announced her would do his part. Already done. Better still he texted his team verifying the time of the course final the DAY AFTER the exam. My student employee kind of loved that.
I had fun with a group project in college. The class was Small Group Communications. We were divided into groups to do a busy-work project and then analyze the ways the group's communication worked or didn't. All the other people in my group were taking the busy-work so seriously, as if we were going to be graded on that. We weren't. The busy work was just a pretext and wouldn't be graded at all, unless we didn't bother to do it. So I decided to take the role in the group that everyone hates in every group: the slacker who contributes nothing. I spent all the time paying attention to how everyone worked together while not actually doing any of the "work" myself. When we were done, I drafted the final analysis report and let the rest of the group add their own observations to it. They added nothing; they had all been so focused on the "project" that they had forgotten what we were actually supposed to be learning. We got the highest grade in the class because I was "the slacker".
You drafted the final analysis as "the slacker"? You deserve an "F" :-)
Load More Replies...The fault is professors, speak as one. They assign group work to teach students to collaborate. But what stuff now really learn is one person will do the work, two will put a drag on things, and one will sabotage the project. If professors really wanted students to learn about collaboration, they’d teach collaboration. And group dynamics. And leadership skills. It’s lazy professors who don’t know to teach what they assign.
And stuff like this is what we go into never ending debt for... Ah, college... when we do better than our professors but they get paid what we would owe. Sad isn't it?
Yeah, if the "emphasis" is on how you hand off to others.... write your part, present it, then hand it off - "and now here is Don Smith with the next portion of this project" aaaand crickets. You did your part. Why do you need to do it all?
I definitely drop that class and if I continue to the year and I had to do a class summary I'd warn others of this class and tell them not to go.
What sort of school did you attend!!! hat's almost unbelievable. Is the poster in America?
Mmmmmm I remember going through this on an online class. Only 2 of 3 communicated. And I did all the contacting as well as contacting the teacher. Let’s just say I had to rip one into the one that didn’t want to answer me for the teacher to actually do something. But that also made me have to rip into the teacher as well. The teacher has actually had multiple complaints before, but when I came through she decided to take a leave of absence. I don’t play about my grades especially especially with group projects.
Years ago, I was in a grad school EDUCATION course, and my assigned partner was so intimidated by technology that she simply didn't do her part of the final project. I had submitted my sections and assumed she had done so with hers, but was home sick with a fever on the due date. Then I got an angry call from the prof reaming me for not being responsible. I remember sitting on the edge of my bed, nearly delirious at that point, too sick to defend myself but really distressed. I contacted another prof who I knew pretty well. She looked into it and resolved everything... she knew the quality of my work and that I never missed a deadline. I got an A. I don't know how the situation with my partner was addressed. In her defense, this was at the dawn of using technology for projects in non-engineering, etc classes, and we weren't told tech literacy was part of the professor's expectations. I think the prof dropped the ball. Well, those who can't teach, teach teachers.
I noticed a huge difference in the quality of my children's college professors and my own 25 years before (despite them each going to some of the highest-rated first-tier unis in the country), so I think this might be indicative of a behavioral trend with a confluence of factors impacting educator behavior. Firstly, it's essentially impossible to get tenure at a university anymore, which means job security is about nil for many. Secondly, there are so many post-secondary educators competing for employment, that the surplus allows salaries (especially for adjunct positions) to stay lower than they should be--especially considering students are paying $40,000+/yr IN-STATE. Finally, in a hyperactive social media era where every move educators make is scrutinized and often twisted , I assume many educators feel overwhelmed trying to balance all these factors. But the quality of educators has clearly declined--and unis are essentially bamboozling our kids into crippling debt.
Unfortunately not every 'professor' is a 'teacher'. They're very smart with their subject matter, but can't teach others worth a darn.
Yup got ghosted twice this semester in English 102 for peer editing. Fortunately the professor was awesome and let me go to the tutor for a discussion and submit the information
Group projects suck one of my Teachers has a good way to prevent slackers without punishing the wrong person and I think it should be implemented more. Basically on the first or second day of the Project the Teacher has us write down so she can see who does what, and then when wee make the presentation itself we also have to write our names on the slides we did, then the teacher would grade us only on the Work we as individuals completed or were supposed to complete, independently from the rest of the group, this means that if one person decides to slack off everyone else just has to do their part and won't be punished for the slacking student's behavior.
If you don't do group projects then you never learn to collaborate in a team. Children and high school students don't like them because they have vastly different expectations of how people work / should work together but that's precisely the point, to learn how to compromise and adapt. Yes, some teammates suck and yes, the role of the teacher/professor is to monitor what is happening and if they don't then they suck, too, but the point remains, and it's that group projects are less about the content and more about the process.
Similar experience in college when we have to conceptualize an event. Only that my partner (others were in group of 3’s) is a non-Catholic and the topic assigned to us is about Catholic related stuff so kinda no choice there. Did 90% of the paperwork for days and thankfully, my partner did the presentation and he did it pretty well.
I've been there. Got teamed up with a couple of frat boys for a group project. They never had time to get together and blew me off repeatedly(there was always something going on with their frat), so I told the professor and when things got down to the wire, I wrote the report myself. When it can time to do the presentation part, I presented my part and let them stumble through whatever they had managed to come up with.
Is there anyone who LIKES group projects? Or hates them but at least finds them at all educationally worthwhile?
I'll put it this simply: Group projects suck. I'd go short of saying any professor who assigns one should be fired, deported, and set sail in the Indian Ocean with "Free porn" written in Somali on their sail, because I've had some professors who were very involved in managing them, were willing to give different grades based on the assignments within the group, etc. So maybe they'd get white sails and a decent GPS, but I'm sacrificing my principles.
College education is being ruined by a bunch of a$$holes who mimic buzz words like "engagement" and "rubrics" when they have no content to impart at all. "Group projects" is one of those buzz phrases to make up for having nothing to say.
My ACCT professor last semester just disappeared. She didn't respond to voicemails, emails, or texts for 4 days. I asked my best friend, who is a college professor, what to do. My friend said to email the department chair and cover the dean. So I did. The Monday after, my professor sent an email and text to the class saying she was out for a family funeral. We all understood but she never notified anyone. Not her chair. Not her dean. Not her colleagues. Not her 4 classes. She was real pissed at me.
College teachers seem to enjoy punishing their students for no reason other than feeling superior. When I did my last thesis for my second master my teacher barely gave us any corrections at all for months (and the ones done were just proof that her english wasnt sufficient like not understandingpassive sentences). She waited until the last version and then failed me and my colleague "because I dont like the statistical analysis you did". The analysis was planned and explained since the beggining. She just waited to fail us on purpose. I told her that if she did not acept it I would go to the board and she immediately acepted my thesis. What a f*****g asshole.
Collage is treated very differently than public school. Ideally a situation like the one laid out by the OP would actually go to small claims asking for the grade to be dropped and the class to be refunded plus some for time and legal fees. People forget that higher education is business. Obviously this is a "what I know now" thing. I totally got the wrong end of at least one professor while in school too.
Load More Replies...It infuriates me when people give you the "you didnt try hard enough contacting X" and X refuses to respond. This happens at work all the time. It's not my job to make people do theirs. And why am I getting yelled at for doing my job when the other person isn't doing theirs at all?
It's professional gaslighting. Throw the blame on the maligned in order to avoid having to answer for your own incompetence. I see it a lot in business as well. And universities these days are the ultimate hybrid bureaucratic/capitalistic business model--especially state/public institutions.
Load More Replies...I had a classmate that did this to me. She thought she was going to ride it out. I gave her an outline that was very vague on purpose. If she did the reading and her part, it would go smoothly. One day until our oral presentation and still nothing. I approached the professor and he said I do my part and don't help her during the presentation and don't tell her what grade I got. After she floundered and failed at properly presenting her part, he gave us our grading sheets folded up. She came to me after class and said "He gave us a C on that! Can you believe it?" I said "Yeah it sucks." I got an A.
The sad part is, those kinds of people coast through life, using others as stepping stones in order to get the nice, cozy titles and pay, and each time they succeed, it only reinforces the behavior. Running our business, I live by a professional credo: "Reward the positive behavior, punish the negative."--because, while it seems almost sophomorically simple, it's allowing people to get away with bad behavior that helps to reinforce that behavior--and most employers don't have enough of an interpersonal pulse on their enterprises to nip small issues in the bud before they become big issues. That's how work spaces become toxic--because there are always people like you're describing, and many are really good at representing themselves to management as effective and hard-working when, many times, they are the opposite. In my mind, if they are caught and penalized for that kind of behavior, it's also going to renew faith in my better workers that I'm committed to fairness.
Load More Replies...I am dealing with this type of apathy with my medical “provider” it’s frustrating, infuriating and bullshit. This last Monday I dropped the civil tone I had for the last four months and lit into him. It took 24 hours to get done something requested last October. Good thing these assholes dong work for a fire department
That is especially true if you are a woman dealing with professionals. The way many professionals (especially in medicine) dismiss women and their concerns is absolutely stunning. Then when a woman goes into a talk with a lot of knowledge and the assertive tone of a man, she's called every misogynistic name in the book. Women can't win in a patriarchal world. There are no work-arounds for chauvinism.
Load More Replies...That one comment though: "I had no idea college was like Highlander where you could do round absorbing grades." 😆
One more thing to try in situations like this: CC the professor on your emails to the group members. That way, you aren't wasting your time writing extra emails that the prof will never answer, but they can't claim you didn't inform them of the problem. (Don't do this as a standard practice for all group projects, though--it's extremely irritating for a professor who *is* trying to keep up with their email, and makes you look like a narc to the other students. This technique is only for situations where you have the double-whammy of recalcitrant group members *and* a professor who doesn't answer emails.)
Also, while I'm handing out free advice: if you're reporting a concern about lazy group-mates or a professor who doesn't answer emails, *be specific* about what you have tried and when you tried it. Both of these are extremely common complaints; sometimes it's a real problem that requires intervention, and sometimes it's a person with unrealistic expectations about response times, who just needs to wait a few hours. If you want something to be done about it, provide enough details that the person you're complaining to can make an independent assessment of which kind it is.
Load More Replies...Group projects are the devil. I hated them. My student employees are always recounting the h3ll they go through. One kid, though, got some karma. after being the worst slacker in a group of 5, where two people ended up doing all the work, he then became Mr Autonomous and announced her would do his part. Already done. Better still he texted his team verifying the time of the course final the DAY AFTER the exam. My student employee kind of loved that.
I had fun with a group project in college. The class was Small Group Communications. We were divided into groups to do a busy-work project and then analyze the ways the group's communication worked or didn't. All the other people in my group were taking the busy-work so seriously, as if we were going to be graded on that. We weren't. The busy work was just a pretext and wouldn't be graded at all, unless we didn't bother to do it. So I decided to take the role in the group that everyone hates in every group: the slacker who contributes nothing. I spent all the time paying attention to how everyone worked together while not actually doing any of the "work" myself. When we were done, I drafted the final analysis report and let the rest of the group add their own observations to it. They added nothing; they had all been so focused on the "project" that they had forgotten what we were actually supposed to be learning. We got the highest grade in the class because I was "the slacker".
You drafted the final analysis as "the slacker"? You deserve an "F" :-)
Load More Replies...The fault is professors, speak as one. They assign group work to teach students to collaborate. But what stuff now really learn is one person will do the work, two will put a drag on things, and one will sabotage the project. If professors really wanted students to learn about collaboration, they’d teach collaboration. And group dynamics. And leadership skills. It’s lazy professors who don’t know to teach what they assign.
And stuff like this is what we go into never ending debt for... Ah, college... when we do better than our professors but they get paid what we would owe. Sad isn't it?
Yeah, if the "emphasis" is on how you hand off to others.... write your part, present it, then hand it off - "and now here is Don Smith with the next portion of this project" aaaand crickets. You did your part. Why do you need to do it all?
I definitely drop that class and if I continue to the year and I had to do a class summary I'd warn others of this class and tell them not to go.
What sort of school did you attend!!! hat's almost unbelievable. Is the poster in America?
Mmmmmm I remember going through this on an online class. Only 2 of 3 communicated. And I did all the contacting as well as contacting the teacher. Let’s just say I had to rip one into the one that didn’t want to answer me for the teacher to actually do something. But that also made me have to rip into the teacher as well. The teacher has actually had multiple complaints before, but when I came through she decided to take a leave of absence. I don’t play about my grades especially especially with group projects.
Years ago, I was in a grad school EDUCATION course, and my assigned partner was so intimidated by technology that she simply didn't do her part of the final project. I had submitted my sections and assumed she had done so with hers, but was home sick with a fever on the due date. Then I got an angry call from the prof reaming me for not being responsible. I remember sitting on the edge of my bed, nearly delirious at that point, too sick to defend myself but really distressed. I contacted another prof who I knew pretty well. She looked into it and resolved everything... she knew the quality of my work and that I never missed a deadline. I got an A. I don't know how the situation with my partner was addressed. In her defense, this was at the dawn of using technology for projects in non-engineering, etc classes, and we weren't told tech literacy was part of the professor's expectations. I think the prof dropped the ball. Well, those who can't teach, teach teachers.
I noticed a huge difference in the quality of my children's college professors and my own 25 years before (despite them each going to some of the highest-rated first-tier unis in the country), so I think this might be indicative of a behavioral trend with a confluence of factors impacting educator behavior. Firstly, it's essentially impossible to get tenure at a university anymore, which means job security is about nil for many. Secondly, there are so many post-secondary educators competing for employment, that the surplus allows salaries (especially for adjunct positions) to stay lower than they should be--especially considering students are paying $40,000+/yr IN-STATE. Finally, in a hyperactive social media era where every move educators make is scrutinized and often twisted , I assume many educators feel overwhelmed trying to balance all these factors. But the quality of educators has clearly declined--and unis are essentially bamboozling our kids into crippling debt.
Unfortunately not every 'professor' is a 'teacher'. They're very smart with their subject matter, but can't teach others worth a darn.
Yup got ghosted twice this semester in English 102 for peer editing. Fortunately the professor was awesome and let me go to the tutor for a discussion and submit the information
Group projects suck one of my Teachers has a good way to prevent slackers without punishing the wrong person and I think it should be implemented more. Basically on the first or second day of the Project the Teacher has us write down so she can see who does what, and then when wee make the presentation itself we also have to write our names on the slides we did, then the teacher would grade us only on the Work we as individuals completed or were supposed to complete, independently from the rest of the group, this means that if one person decides to slack off everyone else just has to do their part and won't be punished for the slacking student's behavior.
If you don't do group projects then you never learn to collaborate in a team. Children and high school students don't like them because they have vastly different expectations of how people work / should work together but that's precisely the point, to learn how to compromise and adapt. Yes, some teammates suck and yes, the role of the teacher/professor is to monitor what is happening and if they don't then they suck, too, but the point remains, and it's that group projects are less about the content and more about the process.
Similar experience in college when we have to conceptualize an event. Only that my partner (others were in group of 3’s) is a non-Catholic and the topic assigned to us is about Catholic related stuff so kinda no choice there. Did 90% of the paperwork for days and thankfully, my partner did the presentation and he did it pretty well.
I've been there. Got teamed up with a couple of frat boys for a group project. They never had time to get together and blew me off repeatedly(there was always something going on with their frat), so I told the professor and when things got down to the wire, I wrote the report myself. When it can time to do the presentation part, I presented my part and let them stumble through whatever they had managed to come up with.
Is there anyone who LIKES group projects? Or hates them but at least finds them at all educationally worthwhile?
I'll put it this simply: Group projects suck. I'd go short of saying any professor who assigns one should be fired, deported, and set sail in the Indian Ocean with "Free porn" written in Somali on their sail, because I've had some professors who were very involved in managing them, were willing to give different grades based on the assignments within the group, etc. So maybe they'd get white sails and a decent GPS, but I'm sacrificing my principles.
College education is being ruined by a bunch of a$$holes who mimic buzz words like "engagement" and "rubrics" when they have no content to impart at all. "Group projects" is one of those buzz phrases to make up for having nothing to say.
My ACCT professor last semester just disappeared. She didn't respond to voicemails, emails, or texts for 4 days. I asked my best friend, who is a college professor, what to do. My friend said to email the department chair and cover the dean. So I did. The Monday after, my professor sent an email and text to the class saying she was out for a family funeral. We all understood but she never notified anyone. Not her chair. Not her dean. Not her colleagues. Not her 4 classes. She was real pissed at me.
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