school rant

[story645]

Note to self: Don't rely on your partner to do the coding assignment if he's not a fabulous coder and you already know this. Doesn't matter that you were the one to code and hand in the first assignment (for a perfect score) cause you two didn't communicate, so it's only fair that he gets to do this one. Now the assignment is due in a few hours and

Comments

[kerosinkanister]

Ah group work. It's been a while since I've had to do that.

I remember at the start of one ME class the prof tested us on what we knew going in (materials science) and then organized us in groups of three with one who knew a lot, one avg, and one not so good. I was the knew a lot but that experience actually worked well. It gave the guy who didn't know so much a boost but! he did try to work hard and didn't just slack off.

In physics the group stuff was only partners in labs. I had a good experience with a good partner, to the point that we chose to be partners in subsequent labs.

But I've heard some horror stories from my brother on engineering group work. I guess it's good training for real life; some workers do enough to just get by and some carry the project. More seriously, I think group work should be an important part of engineering training since that's apparently how the real world works and very few projects are truly solo projects. But I'm not sure how to create a system that doesn't punish good people with bad partners. Perhaps group work could be integrated earlier on in engineering, maybe even with some lessons on working in a group itself, and with more thorough evaluations of how each member of the group is doing.

[story645]

I joke that I'm a bad lap partner, cause I tend to avoid doing all the calculations and a lot of the nitpicky measurement stuff. But I'm good with the theory and answering questions and helping out with the experiment. In chem I never did the parts of the experiment that required adding one chemical to another, but that's cause in high school I was the kid who'd turn it green if it was supposed to turn pink.

Even at the uni level, most upper level engineering courses (and some lower level ones) have a group project or two. Lots of practice with it, and I've had experiences where there's individual evaluation and when there isn't.

[kerosinkanister]

I think we had some group work with peer evaluation but I think people typically aren't honest there, maybe being nice in hopes of not getting a bad evaluation in return.

[story645]

Ours was more of the "label what you did" variety. I also think that a lot of people don't want to tell the prof that someone's being irresponsible cause a lot of people have that one time they weren't so responsible.