Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Slackers

am really mad about something that happened at school last night. Every class there are certain people who try to negotiate the syllabus with the instructor. They want to have work removed so they “can concentrate on the big project” or whatever the excuse is. Sometimes they are successful and sometimes not. It has always bothered me – we are MBA students, paying for the degree, paying for the chance to learn. We should not be acting like high school kids trying to get something for nothing.

Last night, they started again. This course is 7 weeks long, we have 5 workshops left. There are 2 individual papers (one of which was turned in last night) and two team assignments. They don’t want to do the second individual assignment. Well, I have already done my second individual assignment; I don’t want that work to be for nothing! Anyway the instructor said that she would consider removing that assignment, but that would mean that the 15% of your grade that this assignment would have been worth would be applied to another assignment. I was the only one in the class who voiced concerns.

This means that you have a larger chance of ending up with a poor grade as the grades are now not spread out over as much area. I told them that I did not agree, but I would not hold up the entire group if everyone else agreed. So, now that 15% is added to the huge final team project; now instead of being worth 20% of the final grade it is worth 35%. If this project is a total bust, then you are basically going to get a bad grade for the whole course.

Now, perhaps I would not be so upset about this, if I had not spent 3 hours yesterday proofing and correcting a section of our smaller team project. The two ladies who started the rally for getting rid of the assignment sent me their section of the smaller team project and it was a god awful mess. One chick does not even know how to change it in Word so that you have double spacing, so she just hit enter twice at the end of each line!!!! How is she a director at her company and how has she gotten through 2 years of this MBA program without knowing this most basic of concepts???? Don’t even get me started on the formatting for the APA standard that we are using (and have been using for the last 2 years of this program).

They are the ones going “this will be great, we always do great on our team stuff” I wonder if they would be singing the same tune if I had sent back their corrections before class. Probably – they just want to get out of the work.

Do they go to their bosses and say “you know this project you gave me to do? Well, it’s a lot of work, how about I don’t do some of it?”

Sorry, just needed to get that off my chest!

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