OK, college students, how do I handle this (class situation)?

[graygables]

I got my B.A. 15 years ago (English/education) and am working on my Master's. I'm doing online classes, which I love, except we have this whole team concept thing going on (new experience to me). In my current class, I have an idiot that was in my last class, but on a different team, so just annoying. Now he's on MY team. It's so scary, he's a JROTC instructor (teaches high school) and can't write worth a DARN. Paragraph long run-on sentences that have absolutely no point. How he has made it this far into the program (we have to maintain a 3.0) amazes me. I can't imagine that anyone reading the blather would give it anything better than a D (and that's being generous).

So, he's late with a team assignment and if he gets it done, it will be crap. Do I re-write it or do I leave it alone (I'm the editor). Do I write the section myself to save the team grade and be sure that the instructor knows or do I leave his section empty? Do I write this guy and give him some pointers on writing with clarity or ignore him and hope he goes away?

This particular professor has proven to be difficult already, criticizing without offering guidance, so we're all shooting in the dark at the moment (and afraid to say anything in fear for our grades...)

 

[weish]

Personally, I'm really OCD about my grades so if I were the editor, I'd fix the section myself. But that's not everyone's cup of tea, especially if you can't grade your teammates. Usually that's what I would do if our final grade was partially the prof's grade, and our grades of each other. Then you could give that person a lower grade for the work he's done and still have an (hopefully) A paper!

I would definitely not leave the section blank, however, since it reflects poorly on the entire group that you did not get it done. I think blanks are worse than having a section with poor spelling and grammar.

By the way, have you talked to anyone else in your group about him to see what they think?

Sorry I'm not much more help.. it's really hard in group situations to get everyone on the same effort and academic level.

 

[Jaimenjones]

Personally, I would help the guy. Maybe in his eyes his writing is okay. If you give him pointers (in a nice way) maybe things will improve. His section should be re-written because it is a team effort and professions (at my college) take off for grammar and spelling errors. However, I would ask him to assist in the re-writing. I would go through his section a little at a time and discuss errors and make suggestions. I wouldn’t re-write the section myself I would have him re-write it in his own words with the corrections that we are discussing. He should write it then and there so you can see what he is writing.

 

[sylvesterT21]

That is a tough situation for everybody. I would definitely try to talk with him and give him some pointers on how to write better sentences. As long as you approach him in a nice way, and not in a "You are terrible but I know what I am doing" sort of way, I think he would be willing to listen. Maybe he just has been getting along fine because people understand what he says even if it's not easy to read.

But in any case, I would say talk to him of course, but if he isn't doing the work, unfortunately you have to. That is part of team dynamics, it happens everywhere and there's not much you can do to prevent it.

 

[Berlioz70]

So, he's late with a team assignment and if he gets it done, it will be crap. Do I re-write it or do I leave it alone (I'm the editor). Do I write the section myself to save the team grade and be sure that the instructor knows or do I leave his section empty? Do I write this guy and give him some pointers on writing with clarity or ignore him and hope he goes away?

I just earned my masters in Education about a week ago and this situation is incredibly similar to one I went through; the difference of course is that mine was face-to-face. My other group members and I waited for the female to give us her section to see if any minor edits could save it, unfortunately it could not be saved. We told her that it was hard to understand and that it didn't flow well with the rest of the project. She tried to rewrite it, but it was still pretty bad.

We spoke with the professor and said that we had some concerns about her writing and asked for suggestions. The professor said we should try to work with her and her writing (but we didn't have time for that) so we ended up rewriting her whole section. It wasn't so much the grade that concerned us, but the fact that if we wanted to use the project in our final portfolio we wanted it to be more polished.