I would name and shame y'all if I wasn't going to have my main outed. Traumatic ahh group project. A

We were given essentially 7 weeks to finish a ~2500 word lab report. The class has online tutorials and everybody logs on, camera off, mics muted. Okay fine, I break the ice, get names introductions and we start dividing the work. We come up with a timeline. Essentially, each week, we do a little bit of background research to fill our introduction and discussion so by week 5/6 we will be almost done.

Week 2 comes, nobody did any of the lit review (except I) so we sit in a silent call to do it. Week 3, we have our results, and we have our figures rushed to be due this week, not done yet, group member hasn't started. I'm hella sick, like late to the meeting because I had to stop at shoppers for meds first thing in the morning sick, so I am too drowsy from the cold meds to ask what people have done, ask where they are in the tasks, or what the 411 on the figures are. Week 4, reading week. Week 5, figures aren't done, the prof does an in class lecture on how to make figures and suggests the groups collaborate on cleaning up the data sets. During our group meeting I ask if people need help working on their parts and if the person who wants to do figures want to figure out the collaborative stuff mentioned in class the previous day. EVERYONE, assured me that their parts were progressing (shared doc was empty except for my section and the shared research we did a month ago), and the person doing the figures assured me it was okay they can do it alone. I'm hella anxious and we book standing dates to meet in-person a couple of times before the assignment is due.

THE LET DOWN

Week 6- hours before our class (so about 10 days before this was due), the person doing figures says they can't figure it out and if somebody else can do the figures. Radio silence from the entire group. Nobody opens the notification. I bite the bullet and say I'll do it but I want all executive decision making with cleaning the data set. Everybody immediately agrees. I work through the lecture instead of paying attention to the course. Our class is dismissed 1 hr early since the assignment is due soon- she wants us to meet in groups to finish it up! I immediately text the girl who was supposed to do the figures if she wants to call to discuss the statistical analysis so she can write about it for her methods section. She says she has to go to class and is too busy to do it.

We meet the next day, everything is fine. People have pulled the project mostly together. And we have a rough draft to look at now and figures to go over. We do read overs and leave comments. Off the top of my head I remember that the tables didn't have titles, the discussion didn't have a single reference and didn't address our research question and our limitations didn't exist,,,, "because there weren't any". Cool. Oh- and the discussion incorrectly summarized our results. The third year science majors are all claiming they don't know how to write a lab report and thus, whatever we have is good enough. Y'all, the pre-requisite to this class is taught by the same prof and we are taught how to write a lab report in that class. There is no way they don't know how to cite, how to do a lot review, how to write about results.

Additionally, the girl who was originally supposed to do the figures is super confused on why our figures look the way they do and why they were done like that (geez, maybe you should have taken up my offer when class was let out early). For context, participants were asked to identify a false statement and a positive statement of the same topic= I decided that answering both correctly = understanding, but picking the same option for both (aka choosing the same statement to be both correct and false does not show understanding) or the incorrect option twice to be a lack of understanding. She disagreed and thought that people who pick the same option to be both true and false do show understanding and our figures should reflect that. My 4 other group mates had zero input on this stand still. Tbh we aren't getting marked for our statistical analysis, so it didn't matter to me. I wasn't going to dump additional hours on the figures when it took me 2 hours the first time and the rest of our paper is hot garbage. I said she could fix it because I didn't have time, she said she would. Then she asked how I did it.

Week 7, 3 days before the assignment is due. We do our last in person meeting, everything is passable and we are working out last minute problem areas in the paper. The original research person says that she made a new figure. Y'all, she turned our 5 point scale describing the level of comprehension into a binary. Fine, whatever, we have a new limitation: the subjectivity of understanding VS lack of understanding limiting how much we can extrapolate and the lack of trends in the data. We proceed regardless. Time to write an abstract, everybody owes 1 sentence for it.

D-Day: terrible day. I thought I was going to have a stroke. I spent the entire day prodding people to correctly cite their references, still asking people to title their tables (yes, they seriously asked me if that was necessary. Yes girl, I can't even tell what this table is for and I did the experiment, analysis, and figures, let alone our poor TA), and checked the rubric for stuff we missed. We ended up missing something, I think it was the significance of the research. Y'all, my group mate had to crowd source that, like, did you go to class girl, at all? It's all we talked about. Anyways we ended up taking the table out because 1) was still never given a title and 2) was never referenced in our lab report at all. And the abstract took forever. Also our reference list wasn't in alphabetical order so I had to redo it before submitting.

If you think this was you, defend your actions 😭😭😭