two points for honesty

one of the more brilliant moves by my professors was deciding to incorporate peer evaluations into their grading of group projects. what this means is that everyone in the group rates / grades each other and turns them in to the teacher, who takes the scores and comments that your group members gave you into account when giving grades. i had two group members in two separate projects who were totally not with the program. one of them was a single mom with two kids, so i kind of understood why she wasn't as involved as she should have been. but the other one...

i've worked with this girl before and she was a bit of a handful. her priorities lay with her boyfriend's wishes (who was also in that group) and not with what the rest of the group wanted to do. i had pretty much an a+ in the class before we turned in the group project. when they turned in their portion (it was a three-part project) my grade in the class almost went to a b because they got a c- on it. needless to say, i was peeved. i didn't want to work with her again, but she pretty much got in my face and asked to be in the group this time around. i thought i would give her a chance because she was no longer with the boyfriend, and she might do better work. and i was wrong! it figures. this is my comment section on the peer evaluation form for this project. it's exactly what and how she did, i am making nothing up.

"I really feel as though (name here) did not contribute as much to the project as she could have. Her work, on the whole, was really terrible and incomplete when she turned it in, and the rest of the group would have to turn around and do research that she should have done to fix it. Her writing was also atrocious and she would claim that she “didn’t know if her writing was crap” and so we would have to help her fix everything. She also was very resistant to putting in time and effort in this project. She did not pay attention to the things we discussed in group meetings and was much more focused on getting out of the meeting or watching a Colts game. She also had her boyfriend (who is not in the class, nor has he ever taken it) do the research for her. So when she brought it to the meeting, she didn’t know the significance of it. When we asked her to do more she said she would just “have her boyfriend do it later.” In conclusion, I did not find her to be a productive group member, she leeched off the other members, and I will never work with her again."

i know that i'm pretty much posting this for the world to see, but i felt the need to let it out in a big way. i also want to say that i have been reluctant to give bad reviews to group members in the past, but i'm not afraid anymore to say how i really feel. i gave this girl a lot of chances to fix her work and i even told her how i felt, but she continued to play games about not knowing the quality of what she did. so, i'm calling her bluff. if she has any issues with me doing this, i'm all up for talking it out. i'm just not going to be taken advantage of anymore!

ugh. seriously.

deep breath...aaaaand....i'm over it.

in other news, finals are almost over. just two on monday, then a semester and a summer class until i'm done! i'm going to do some research on advertising agencies in my area, as well as in chicago, nyc, florida, south carolina...i'm pretty open at this point, and i think it would be neat to move out on my own for a while. plus, it would teach me some more self reliance, which goodness knows i could use a dose of. speaking of which, i need to go make myself some dinner. popcorn, anyone?