i'm in an online class, and my partner screwed me on a group assignment -- do i tell the teacher? or do i end up looking like a jerk?

so i was supposed to collaborate with student X on a short-term (one week) wiki article for an online (distance learning) class i'm taking. since the class is online, i don't know X. due to... whatever, i never contacted the partner, and the partner never contacted me. a few days before the paper was due, i began writing the wiki article, leaving lots of stuff to fill in, readily accessible for X. student X did not contribute. next day i wrote more. X still didn't contribute. on the day the assignment was due, I finished the article while X contributed diddly-squat. now i find out the grade is shared. the wiki is a little short and frantic, because it is entirely in my voice. turns out we're getting a group grade on the project. i'm sorta pissed that X is getting a free ride, but at the same time I never contacted X. it's not like X couldn't have figured out what was going on by LOOKING AT THE DAMN WIKI AND TRYING TO WRITE SOMETHING.

q: do i email the professor and 'fess up, say I that X and I were not in contact, but that even so ALL of the work is mine? or do i let the issue rest? the assignment is worth 15% of my grade.

sounds like u might wanna let it rest if you never contacted him.

that is sort of my inclination. on the other hand, tho, it wouldn't have been hard for X to have contributed to the open – and visible, and in progress – wiki as per the assignment. bleh.

You never know - the prof may be able to see that for himself and the loafer's own grade for the class might end up reflecting that.

man, the future of education.

you sorta lose 99% of sympathy points by not having contacted your partner, but maybe you can write an email to the prof and strategically leave that part out.

don't say anything and email your partner next time

it's prob worth it to you to accept this as a painful lesson about online classes and not give your professor any reason to question your work for the remainder of the course.

I think the worst thing that writing a wiki article is a real assignment for a real college class.

*is that

When in doubt, talk to the prof.

most wiki articles are just c and ps from college essays anyway

also a wiki article will at least have a log showig that you were the sole author

the opposite is true too though xp

wtf is up with your partner not taking the iniatiative and contacting you though? this is a two-way street

well, if all of the work is magically getting done, what's the incentive to contact?

I think the worst thing that writing a wiki article is a real assignment for a real college class.

― Green Manalishi (Viceroy), Tuesday, July 13, 2010 11:47 AM (11 minutes ago)

First of all, this is a graduate class. Second, I fail to see why this is a bad idea. The particulars of the assignment asked that every partnership write a (private, class-only) wiki article on a specified theorist in our field of X during the first week of class, and that we were then to look at each others' wikis and correct/improve/elaborate them in subsequent weeks as our awareness of the theories and personalities deepens. I found it a pretty good way to learn the thumbnail specs on new theories/theorists in a (new to me) arena I had not encountered before.

i had a friend who had a similar problem with an assigned partner - went to the prof with it and was told that it was a real cryin' shame.
i'd like to hope yours would at least be a little more sympathetic tho.

Ppl in this thread need to know that Wikipedia is not the only wiki.

yeah, i have to write wikis for work all the time

contact the prof and be like, "i didn't get ahold of X, but he/she didn't get ahold of me - so i expected that he/she would simply collaborate me via the wiki page. i know i should have taken the initative to contact her/him, but my social anxieties got the better of me, i guess. i'm working on that." etc. profs have heard it all; just tell the truth.
maybe your partner ended up doing their own thing or something?
is part of the mark on 'team work'? guessing not, so just state the facts

I know there are other wikis than wikipedia. But remy didn't initially explain the extent of the assignment and I thought it was silly to post something online as an assignment instead of turning it in as a paper. I have experienced such things in undergraduate classes and they serve no purpose at all. I understand now that this wasn't that kind of assignment.

"also a wiki article will at least have a log showig that you were the sole author"

I'm curious why you'd be evaluated as a group when there's a very good mechanism to see very quickly who did what, at least in terms of qty.

med school note coop/wiki saved my dang life i can tell you

Why didn't you contact your partner? I'm not criticizing, just wondering -- I work with a lot of online course designers and instructors and wonder if this problem could have been avoided if the instructions had been better written or if the instructor had communicated differently about this assignment.

should be either a poll or a Yahoo Answers tbh

i think contacting the partner is kinda ancillary, tbh, given the open nature of the assignment. clearly you ~should~ have but it's not like the other party can honestly say "i didn't know what was going on, who was writing what, etc"

it's a fukkin WIKI. it seems entirely probable that they could have never directly communicated and still produced the requisite article.

xpost @ s.s.

you mean the assignment or this question?

it was gonna ask it on metafilter, but i don't like them any more -- bunch of condescending menopausal housewives who blackballed me for saying americans should consider adoption a first option rather than crank themselves full of fertility drugs.

more than one way to form a babby

I'd have blackballed you too, especially if you said it like that

unless i was cranked full of fertility drugs myself, i would not have made a huge deal out of that.

I don't think they're as fun as the 'drugs' part would suggest.

the fertility part sounds like a ~blast~ tho

this shit will have you totally cranked

This is commonplace in grade 6 (not sure if you consider the two situations comparable). Students will come up to me a day or two before the due date and complain that such-and-such didn't do anything. My first instinct tends to be, "Why are you telling me this now?" Depending upon the student, though (i.e., is this someone whom I trust, and whom I know is not a complainer by nature), I have intervened.

it was the "crank"ing part that sounded fun.

xpost!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UFIYGkROII

well see here you have a situation where a) trust and b) over-stating the situation ("complaining") aren't even relevant: the wiki shows who did what. still not sure if it's worth bringing it up, but at least remy doesn't have to do any convincing.

@ Brad C.,

Here's why I didn't contact the partner:

This was the very first assignment in the class, and I was super-busy just trying to answer the questions/do the reading. I was also a little anxious about first-contact with a classmate, and a little bit just-plain avoidant. I kept figuring that after a day or two, X would contact me. Additionally, I thought that since I wrote all of the wiki framework and the first 1/2 of the article very early, it would be more than clear where X could jump in. Not excusing myself, just explaining.

actually, my phrasing on MeFi was something like "adoption may be a more viable and conscientious option than IVF/Fertility drugs –– at the same price –- for many families" which lead to a firestorm about how I knew nothing about adopted families and how fucked up they were -- and 'you never know what you're gonna get' etc. (p.s. I'm adopted, so is my sister, so is my cousin, I will be adopting, and I've done a lot of work in adoption advocacy.

I have to chime in and say there's probably not much you can do, but make sure to CYA next time. I always document everything, and generally what I would generally do (and what I'd recommend) is send an introductory email/text/phone call (however you were told to do it), asking to hash out which parts you both would do. On the first non-response, I'd politely write back that I didn't hear from him, and wanted to make sure he got the original.

On the second, I send a more pointed email, and this time the professor is CCed. That way he has a memory of the situation if you wind up doing all of the work. Yes, the classmate might get mad at you, but well, then they should have done the assignment.

Chances are this person will try it again and not be so lucky.

dude. how well do you know each person on ilx?
how can you be anxious about contacting a random classmate?!

xposts

actually, my phrasing on MeFi was something like "adoption may be a more viable and conscientious option than IVF/Fertility drugs –– at the same price –- for many families" which lead to a firestorm about how I knew nothing about adopted families and how fucked up they were -- and 'you never know what you're gonna get' etc. (p.s. I'm adopted, so is my sister, so is my cousin, I will be adopting, and I've done a lot of work in adoption advocacy.

yeah, the issue there is "conscientious" which is a totally loaded word that should likely be avoided when dealing with women who already feel like upset abject failures because they can't get pregnant on their own and have had their emotions ramped up to 1000 due to pregnancy hormones

Yeah, I know. I was intending to provoke just a little a bit... but things got really wild and ad hominem and bigoted super-quick, and I decided to skedaddle. I used to love MeFi b/c of the reasonable civility and diversity of opinions, but it got really homogenized some time in the last year.

I understand your reasons for not contacting your fellow student. I have dealt with a lot of social anxiety and avoidant issues and it can be real tough - I have taken lower grades in classes because I was afraid to talk to other students or the professor.

If you are up to it, I'd contact the prof and explain it truthfully. Also, as gbx has pointed out, the wiki site software should have log pages that show you as having done everything so there should be nothing you need to prove, its all right there.

i don't know if it should be even tacitly endorsed in academia, but freeriding is an important life-skill, I've found. Maybe that's the reason why they're grading as a group when it logistically it makes no sense to? Simulating "real world" dynamics? Other dude should have been more gracious about freeloading though.

i still would wait and see--there's a chance the prof will look at the wiki logs and ask what the deal is--then politely state your case, acknowledging that you both had responsibility to contact each other.

passive aggression in online classes is really the worst--once you started putting stuff up the other dude really had no excuse--i'm pretty avoidant myself and in the online class environment it can only lead to stress and shitty feelings.

haha, this thread is actually making a strong case for the benefits of google wave!!!

it's too bad it isn't a live class where you can discuss it (even if it was like a phone teleconference), cuz then if the teacher asked you questions on your presentation you could defer to your classmate for the answer

don't wikis have a "talk" page?

In my high school teaching, I try and include an individual portion in any group assignment so that students have some degree of personal accountability. When groups malfunction, and they do all the time, I try and handle it on a case-by-case basis, but generally the onus is on the group to figure things out. I can tell you that last minute pleas for help and reports of dysfunction after the due date are kind of annoying. I definitely want my students to be proactive about identifying and dealing with problems earlier in the assignment. Seeing as these are teenagers, any outcome from group work has value - life lessons and all that. I can't imagine handling these situations in a distance learning situation. Your prof must have some kind of set policy that is applied almost universally.

:B

learning to work with assholes is good business experience

"also a wiki article will at least have a log showig that you were the sole author"

i don't know that this will indicate anything to the prof grading the class though - they might well assume that it only shows one author bcz the two of you discussed it by email and you were the one who updated it with the agreed text.

then you just tell them that isn't the case

can you email them both, say there has been some miscommunication, apologise for your part in this, and ask the teacher for an extension so your partner can add their contribution to the assignment?