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grr, and a What Would You Have Done?
I ranted once before about this horrible group I had to work with all semester for my ethical research methods class. It was a stupid annoying class and virtually all the course work was completed in a group.
One group member completely bailed partway through the course. She never returned to our meetings, and when I emailed her as we were doing our last big assignment, she claimed to be confused about when we were meeting and swore to participate from then on out, but she didn't.
We just got our final project returned to us, and the instructor made many notes about how we should have mentioned in our paper about lack of participation, because her lack of participation had an impact on our ability to analyze the research, and to gather the research (she wasn't saying that we didn't do a good job, she was more saying that we were missing out on a possible different view point).
She made it pretty clear (imho) that we should have basically bad-mouthed this group member in our paper. WTH? Would someone actually do that? Even though it was pretty crappy that she didn't participate with us, it seems so petty and unprofessional to vent about her in our term paper.
Would anyone have actually bad-mouthed a partner in a group project? I feel like we were penalized for taking the high road.
Re: grr, and a What Would You Have Done?
No, she definitely meant the paper. And she was notified ahead of time (she even made a comment to us about "For those of you who participated in this project" when our assignment was returned. It was never stated in the paper at all that someone didn't participate, because we didn't want to be rude, but she did know.
Here's some of what she said in our feedback:
Would this problem have been alleviated with stronger relationships with certain group members?... I still don't have a clear idea of who was responsible for the group analysis. This sentence implies that not everyone participated in doing the analysis, but you did not identify why. What difficulties did this lack of participation present for your group? ... What you have here as a process analysis is very good but you had some very real group dynamic issues that have gone unstated. What happens when one group member doesn't contribute to the data analysis?
If one person not participating would affect the outcome of my group's paper then yes, I would have told the professor. I agree with not "tattle-taling", but I also think that there is an adult appropriate way to express concerns about people carrying their load.
It happens in the workplace all the time. I think as long as you went to this group member first and tried to solve the problem on your own, then the instructor was your next step.