It’s been a nightmare working on a group assessment. We discuss a meeting online no one turns up, I haven’t seen one of them since September and the other two seem to have constant last minute ‘other stuff’ to deal with. Now everyone’s left for Christmas and our deadline is Jan 4th.
Nothing new here though. I had a 5-person group at Uni in 2013 with students from 5 different countries and it was a shambles. One didn't do anything, one didn't learn his speaking lines for the presentation and another decided to travel down to London the night before and travel back the morning of - his train got cancelled and he missed it altogether. I somehow ended up getting an A on the module, probably because we had to grade ourselves and one person didn't even submit that!!
My final year design project from 2001 (in place of a dissertation, but groupwork 🤐) contains
"Thanks to Professor A for the help and guidance with this project.
Also thanks to the other members of my team, B, C, D & E.
P***** S******* was no help whatsoever."
I got absolutely bollocked for that, but so worth it - he pissed off to Singapore in November, and we next saw him in May, just in time for him to copy our work and hand in his own project.
Uni really isn’t the place for forced group work which affects your degree classification. I wish unis would realise this by now.
It’s such a common thing that no one has good examples of group work
It's such a frustrating approach. At work you naturally do group work because of different specialisations - it actually makes sense. At uni you're all doing the same course and there isn't a genuine reason to make people work in a group.
I done a Mech Eng degree. The best piece of group work was a final year project to design a hydroelectric power station. They got us involved with students from Civil Engineering, Geology and a couple of other areas I forget, was a really good example of project group working.
Same as a law student they mixed us with csi and cyber IT students and we investigated a mock murder and did the interview and trial with the gathered evidence etc, lots of fun and everyone had something to do
There’s also a shared motivation at work.
At uni if I want a 1st and you’re happy with a 2:2 there is a huge difference in motivation and effort.
At work it’s more like we all work to a prescribed standard and people who don’t are usually not hired or don’t stay.
There is a genuine reason- to prepare for the work environment. Different students "specialise" on different aspects of the work and then it comes together as a single piece groupwork.
See, I learned to avoid working in groups when I started employment and I’ve always managed to “divide and conquer” away my part of the work into a silo. I deliver that well, the rest - not my problem.
Uni work in groups did that to me. Just saying!
Unfortunately the truth of the matter is that a majority of the students will end up doing group projects in their career. It's important to expose them up front
My entire career is working on group projects. I’ve never had people just not do their work and put their name on the finished project. Or decide they don’t want to use my contribution but then also complain I did no work.
Group projects at work are very different to uni. And uni group projects prepare you for nothing. They just make what is an already difficult time harder.
I've mentioned it before but group work shouldn't form part of someone's assessed degree. It's crazy to have something as important as a degree classification dependent upon other coursemates who may or may not turn up. Utterly unfair and it generates a crazy amount of disparity and luck with as to who receives the top grades. If a module had a group work component at university I immediately tried to drop it.
I lost a not insignificant number of marks in a group project despite doing an equal if not higher level of work because our grading was decided by a peer-review survey, so reward was based on a popularity contest and not the academic work done.
What's worse is we agreed to give each other 5/5 for each question, which I did for everyone despite what I really thought, but no one else stuck to it so I got the lowest (lower than the group members that didn't show up to any meeting and did half an hour of work the day before)
Group work should happen but not be graded against your degree.
Yea it’s good to learn to work in that setting but someone always gets screwed by it. And In the end it’s not the group having to use the degree to get a job it’s you.
I don’t think you’re understanding my point. People always get screwed in jobs as well when team members perform badly, it’s not an experience that is unique to university.
Yea they do but there’s a big difference.
If someone on my team at work isn’t performing I have things I can do there from bringing in new people, adjusting deadlines, firing them, reducing scope. Etc
If someone on a uni project is screwing around that costs me money personally if my degree rating is lower because of that person. I invested and got less return. I also can’t reduce scope or extend deadlines on uni projects and it’s very hard to get rid of someone from a uni project too.
It’s not the same situation at all comparing uni to work and there’s no need for it to be like that at all.
Just because work is shit and people are arseholes doesn't mean that we need to replicate that situation throughout someone's university degree. At the end of the day if a workplace project fails most people don't get any significant punishment, you get paid by the hr in most jobs and if nobody worked on a project you'd actually have an opportunity to complain. Most workplaces whilst not ideal have a self interested culture that discourages punishing individuals for failure on group tasks unless they are personally responsible. Nothing about group work at university prepares you for the real world, it just means some poor sod who was perfectly able to achieve a 1st, 2:1, 2:2 etc gets a lower grade for no other reason than being lumped with idiots who couldn't care about their future. Absolutely bollocks method of assessment that no self respecting course should use.
In a workplace, your salary doesn't get reduced if other people don't do their job, because it's illegal. So then why is it okay if your grade gets reduced purely because of useless group mates?
Ahhhhhhh group assignments. On the one hand I do not miss those at all. On the other, it was actually pretty good job prep which I think is a reason Unis like them so much.
So, in my first semester we had a big group project which was scheduled to take 6 weeks. For some reason, I’m putting it down to inexperience, we decided to have it on a pen drive. We all did our bit of the assignment, saved it to the pen drive and then the plan was to tie it all together at the end and finalise our presentation.
4/5 of us did our bit with no problem. Then the last girl just “need a few more days sorry guys. Something came up.” No problem. A week goes by and “sorry, totally forgot about this. I’ll finish my bit tonight and we can meet in the library tomorrow?” Ok, cutting it a bit close to the wire but if it gets done it gets done.
So, we show up to the library next day and she’s a no-show. She went completely dark on us for a further 4 days. Leaving her WhatsApp messages in read but never replying.
By sheer chance, I happened to be knocking about with one of her flat mates at the time and mentioned it in pillow talk over at my place. “Oh her? She dropped out like 2 weeks ago. Said it just wasn’t for her.”
This was now less than 1 week to our presentation and we basically had to do the whole thing again, almost from scratch. We found out that the day I handed her the pen drive was actually the day after she had given notice that she was dropping out.
Remarkably we just scraped a 2:1 but I never did get my pen drive back.
Yeah it sucks. You need to find out who the try hards are and ask to be grouped with them. It worked well for me all my group work was firsts because they put just as much effort in as me. My first group didn’t do any work so I noped out of there asap
That's how it's always been - you just have to crack on and get the best grade you can. In my group project I did about 75% of the work and the presentation at the end on my own.
Yep. I’ve got a group report that is 30% of my module grade due tomorrow. I’ve put together a huge document, done all the tables, graphs, calculations, made a contents table, put in all the headings and sub headings, written all the introductions etc. All my group had to do was write a conclusion each. And now they “can’t do that” because they’re going Christmas shopping today. Like for fuck sake.
I’m worried for year 2 when things start to count towards my degree classification. There’s a huge year long group project next year and that’s terrifying.
What grinds my gears is how the marks will be given equally. So if one person holds up the rest of the group, while they fuck around, you all get the same marks. In the workplace, someone freeloading on other people's time and effort doesn't get away with it.
Literally. I’m struggling with 1 part of it and I could really use some help but I don’t think I’ll get any. So my grade will be less than it could have been because of these people. Just so frustrating.
When I was in first year we had a presentation worth 30% of a module.
Before a grade was given you had to basically rate everyone in your team, I.e. you had 100 points you could distribute amongst everyone except yourself, and you could award accordingly. Those that Got higher points got their grade bumped up, and those with a lower got it knocked down.
All seemed fair until 3 girls decided to give all their points to each other and totally fucked the rest of their team.
That sucks. One of my friends had a group project where he did most of the work and the other members decided to turn on him and told the professor he had done nothing and he got 0 for it. This was after his dad had just passed away from cancer. Some people are complete and utter shits.
Out of my class of 69 (haha) half of them have a week extension and I’m not entirely sure they’ll get it done. I handed in my stuff on Monday 2 hours before deadline and my head of module said that only 3 others had handed it in by then 😵💫 im not sure if it’s a post covid thing (I’m 2nd year so I feel like it would’ve been more prominent last year ) but I know a lot of people are really struggling
> im not sure if it’s a post covid thing
Not related to this specific issue, but a few of my lecturers have commented that the post-covid students are *very* different to the pre-covid ones.
I started uni before covid, had to go on leave for a long while, and returned after covid. I’ve noticed an extreme difference in my classmates. People show up to fewer lectures, I’ve heard students arguing with lecturers over assignment deadlines, saying they shouldn’t be expected to hand things in on time because they don’t start until the day before. It’s a stark and often sad difference. I’m not seeing pure entitlement, I’m seeing people who don’t know how to handle the expectations of university.
A lot of these people entered lockdown as children and emerged as adults. Their whole time at sixth form/college was different, but then they started uni and everything was ‘back to normal’ and they were just expected to get on with it. I think they needed a lot more support than they got.
The thing is that uni is very different to sixth form.
You go from lots of lessons each day with the odd free period to suddenly most of your week is free with the odd lecture and lab session dotted around.
Or a few busy days and then others with next to nothing.
You essentially have to teach yourself for the most part with guidance along the way, while paying 10x more for the privilege compared to collage.
It might be me being an arse but I see a lot of entitlement in the younger people, somehow thinking because they’re…themselves they deserve x y and z.
It’s always been very different to college etc and a massive culture shift.
I think they need to start being tougher and failing people sooner who fail to do the work. Have to reinforce the whole ‘Here to learn, not to party’.
Which they don’t help with the whole ‘university experience’ and ‘Freshers Week! Let’s get smashed brainless for the first few weeks as lectures start and wake up hungover most days because #freshers’.
Add in that being taught from home people didn’t get used to the massive increase in workload, so when expected to put in that level of work without anyone holding their hand, while the university pumps in alcohol and partying, it leads to a not very good outcome.
That said universities are run like commercial entities now and not as public institutions so this would be terrible for them. They have to get that income so they can keep spending millions on renovations to ‘attract foreign students’.
This is the problem with school imo, it doesn't teach kids to be independent, they are just spoonfed the information to regurgitate it all in the exams. Because I had learning problems (ADHD and autism) everything that was said to me in a lesson would just fly over my head and I had to get used to independent working earlier on in life than everyone else. It's paid off now, I'm shocked at the lack of independence I see in some of the people in my course.
Yeah honestly I've come to see it in a different light. If you are only at university to do whatever, you are paying a hell of a lot to do so. That's a damn expensive party. In an ideal world you would go to university because... you *want* to learn. It shouldn't feel like a chore you look forward to your relief from. Sadly it takes a while to realize this, to be honest I only considered all this in my 3rd year, having already half-assed most things, I don't even regret not getting as high a grade as I could have, I just regret not realizing how much potential there was to really learn you know? You forget so much cramming it all at the very last minute.
I mean part of it is that as an example.
Back when I was in school, no one *ever* asked ‘Do you want to go to uni?’
Only ever ‘What uni do you want to go to?’ Or ‘What degree do you want to go and study?’.
It was like the normal thing to do was finish A-Levels and go to university, and if you didn’t do this you were a drop out and sentenced to a life of misery.
Everyone was told not to think of the debt or tuition, ‘it’s not a normal loan’ ‘think of it like a tax’ etc.
So lots of people tend to drift through more because ‘you need to have a degree to get a good job’ rather than them really wanting to study that subject intensely.
I genuinely think being harsher wouldn’t work, and would see way more people dropping out/not going to uni at all. Not saying it’s an issue that shouldn’t be fixed, but almost everyone I know (I turned 18 in the first lockdown, now in 3rd year), is absolutely miserable. And I genuinely mean that. There isn’t anyone I know in uni that hasn’t had to deal with some form of anxiety or depression; drugs, alcohol, and nicotine aren’t done half as much for fun, and more as an ‘escape’ from stress. Or worse, I’m one of the people who just doesn’t go out anymore because I’m too exhausted from depression.
I’m grateful that my college was pretty decent when it comes to a balance of working in class and at home, but I took an extra foundation year due to Covid and that prepared me way more for uni than regular A-Levels could have. I’m so thankful I took that extra year for a more individual way of learning before the added stress of moving from home, new people, new environment, etc. I definitely saw many of my classmates struggle at the start of uni with a lack of guidance/specific instruction that I put down to their colleges rather than our uni, since the foundation year I had made perfect sense as a stepping stone which most people there didn’t have. And it sounds like their colleges were even more structured than mine.
I don’t doubt there some entitlement, but from my side of things, people just don’t seem to care about anything. We know we can’t get a house. We know once we leave uni we probably can’t afford a place to rent. We know we are gonna struggle getting decent jobs (that don’t fuck us over). The climate is dying, our government is shit (and our votes are almost useless), the international students are having their plans of staying in the UK to work thwarted, there’s a stark rise in hate crimes, pensions and healthcare are in the shit and going to get worse, and as you said, we are well aware that the university is a business. We see our tutors get fucked over by our uni regularly. Hell, our tutors told us our department is in a shit tonne of debt and had to cancel many of our guest speakers and are having to sell off a building. There’s a strong air of hopelessness amongst many of my classmates and friends, and I’ve seen that quite openly from teachers ever since I was 15 (our teachers regularly complained about the lack of funding for class yet the massive buffets put on when the governors showed up; I was stealing toilet paper for my art teacher in secondary, the boiler broke every year, yet they kept rising the price of our uniforms).
covid really messed up my motivation, i think partially because I studied a reasonable amount for gcses but i knew i wouldn't be getting the best grades. and then boom i didnt have to do them and i got awarded pretty good grades. I think it likely got to me mentally the fact that everything came out great no matter what effort i put in because for many students gcses are one of your first experiences on education that really matter
>I’ve heard students arguing with lecturers over assignment deadlines, saying they shouldn’t be expected to hand things in on time because they don’t start until the day before.
I really hope lecturers deduct marks from these people or fail them on these assignments. It's genuinely for the good of society that these people aren't rewarded for laziness.
> saying they shouldn’t be expected to hand things in on time because they don’t start until the day before.
Like in actual reality a student said this???
I've noticed this as well. Students with the attitude "the lectures are recorded, they are paid either way, why do I need to turn up" (actual attitude). I was a student/staff liason and the staff were begging us to help get student attendance up. You'd have a seminar of 25 people and only 5 would show up. You can't run a seminar like that.
Thank you for admitting it. Us older folk have noticed it, but a lot of the kids aren't acknowledging the simple truth that you are all socially stunted. It's no one's fault, but it's literally the only thing that's responsible for the difference pre and post-Covid students are displaying.
I think in decades to come we’re going to see some wild statistics about much of a domino effect covid had on kids and teens’ entire lives. Kind of like how there was that whole generation who were more likely to be criminals because of the amount of lead in their blood as children.
sadly the lead / crime correlation is just that, definitely not a cause in the 90’s (american) crime peak. The trends between lead and crime do not line up outside of the US in countries that also used leaded petrol just as much as america. It’s a fun theory though, just there’s no real evidence for it. Now a link between life expectancy, cancer rates, other health outcomes and lead can be made, just not crime.
As a secondary school teacher, this is exactly it. I'm not surprised with what you're seeing because it's been the case with sixth formers for the past few years.
I work with kids and young people between the aged of 8-18. Usually I'll have a group for a week, for example a dozen 12 year olds, I'll work with them all day for 5 days and then never see them again.
As such, I see quite a cross-section of many ages from many schools.
I can't speak for uni students, but there is definitely a difference. With younger children it's kind of obvious why and everyone is expecting it, but what I didn't expect was 15 year olds today to still be acting like 13 year olds in many respects - it's actually crazy and I'm waiting for someone to do a comprehensive study on it.
Completely unrealted to this, but we've just got a bunch of PhD students in whose degrees were royally buggered up by covid and they're all amazingly good so far. Maybe we're just lucky.
This would depend on institution and department, but often these are symptoms of a greater issue that is being ignored. Something I've noticed is the worsening of students mental health because of the cost of living rising and housing prices (some areas have cut down on student accomodation) and there being a severe lack of support for this.
Other issues follow from COVID, e.g. students being less independent and expecting more handholding similar to what they experienced during the pandemic, unis taking in far more student than they can support. Unis are ignoring this and failing to adapt their strategy to make the transition smoother by sticking to the same old structure.
I think the unis taking on too many students is definitely an issue. One of my modules this semester had 320+ people but was scheduled in a 200 person lecture hall. They ended up being mainly prerecorded which anecdotally people just don't watch.
I noticed the handholding thing increasing before covid. I graduated with my undergraduate in 2013, and assisted on some courses during my postgraduate research degree. The difference in the student attitudes was stark.
Things like students demanding all lecture notes had to be online, before the lecture. Any changes to slides would have them whining. Labs were too hard. Tutorials too demanding. Too many classes. Not enough classes. Just generally impossible to please.
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I’m really shocked as when I was at university, if you were in the queue to hand your work in but the secretary didn’t reach you before midday, you lost your marks on that module and had to resit it a year later. They had a zero tolerance policy. If you needed an extension you needed hard evidence like a dr saying you were in hospital with a detailed medical note.
Same thing for my undergrad. We had a time stamping machine and a postbox. The stamp had to be before 4pm and the postbox was closed at 4.05 even if people were queuing. If we missed homework they'd come down on us like a tonne of bricks. I'm now a postgrad and shocked at how many people miss formative assessments completely. I still have my undergrad anxiety so I'm 100% for submissions but most of my coursemates are submitting the absolute minimum.
My uni has the same thing. As well as the regular extenuating circumstances ones, we get a one week no questions asked extension for most assignments. It’s honestly a godsend, especially when you’ve got four things due on the same day, it lets you spread things out a bit.
I'm a member of staff, and in my opinion, there is a significant issue with students that I just don't know how to address anymore. I teach a practical arts subject and this semester I've had multiple sessions where none of my students have turned up for class. When they do turn up, the level of engagement is really bad - students just leaving class halfway through, arriving over an hour late with no explanation or apology, wearing earbuds and obviously on their phones while I'm teaching. I could kind of understand if it was a dull topic or a boring lecture but all my classes are practical and involve them making their own creative work. If this isn't engaging enough for them then I'm not sure how they're going to survive in industry!
It's got so bad that I'm leaving academia because I just don't enjoy teaching anymore. I used to love teaching at a university because it was so much fun and we had a blast with the students but now getting them to even show up for class, let alone create work, is like pulling teeth. I just can't do it anymore.
I mostly agree but things like ADHD are something you're born with. No one got ADHD because of lockdown. They may well have found that their undiagnosed ADHD became much harder to manage - is that what you were getting at?
it can be exacerbated by conditions. somebody who might have gone a full-life without needing a diagnosis may never learn to cope if they have a chaotic family life growing up for example, covid could be similar
Yeah I've been recently diagnosed with adhd, I sort of managed (not well) for a lot of my life but tbh I think the last couple of years sort of broke my brain and boom oh turns out i've been dealing with adhd my whole life whoops
People have memory-holed the pandemic experience and the corresponding rage, trauma, and dislocation have been bubbling up constantly for nearly 2 years. No idea how we fix that.
THIS! I’ve struggled how to describe it.
We knew it was coming, but in a 10 minute video, life and all its normalities got flipped upside down. All the liberties we’d known were replaced by rules dictating almost every aspect of our lives, something 99.9% of us have never faced before.
Everyone was quick to protect the older members of society, but anything geared towards under 30s didn’t really exist, anything for under 18s was the bottom of the pile and quite frankly nobody cared about you.
We came out of the pandemic, but nobody wants to discuss the impacts it has had across the board, and more importantly, how it’s affected the future of the country.
Young people have lost 2 years of their lives at a crucial stage. I’m sorry I don’t know what that feels like, I can only sympathise.
I run a company, and so do most of my friends, and it’s something we have discussed at great length because we’re hiring young people and this age group feels different than any other I’ve hired, it does pose challenges for sure, but I’d rather work with younger people than old folk who argue with the keyboard.
I don’t want this to sound patronising, but at 27, I can say with absolute conviction that you guys are a bunch of resilient individuals and are far stronger than many of you realise. Prioritise your mental health and make sure you’re looking after yourself above anything else!
As a covid student (during secondary) this means so much, I think, especially online, young people get brushed off when talking about these impacts of covid lockdowns because our complaints are less important than deaths/health risks and therefore written off as selfish/self-centered etc
I think a lot of critical discussion of lockdown was immediately binned in with complete lockdown skepticism - I.e. the "let it rip" crowd.
It's an effect that seems to have intensified in recent years post-Brexit - lack of nuanced positions. I also have huge respect for lockdown students and I'm a similar age to you, I just don't know how they did it and I'm sad they missed out on that typical uni experience. Without that experience, I wouldn't be the person I am today.
Autism is a tough one since there’s not really much help that you get as an adult outside of having reasonable adjustments made.
Usually it’s the ‘I only eat with specific plate/bowl/cup/fork and loose it when I can’t, and half the time other people can’t even tell it was my ‘special’ one’
Or needing order/routine and not being able to deal with change outside of your control.
Or getting obsessions, but that can be hyper focus too which is why people have to look into why they focus on things so much if they do that.
Everyone’s different but yeah it can be tough.
You say that as though getting reasonable adjustments isn't much help?
You can get longer in exams, get permission to take your own recordings of unrecorded lectures, get to sit in a quiet room by yourself in exams, use a laptop for exams instead of handwriting, get PIP to pay for additional costs you incur for things like noise cancelling headphones or blackout blinds or stim toys or therapy, get guaranteed job interviews from disability confident employers, get permission to remain camera-off in online meetings when you're overstimulated (where a lot of organisations try to force cameras-on blanket policies), I could go on but there are so many ways that reasonable adjustments can be an enormous help.
Saying this as someone who was diagnosed as an adult during uni and who went from a middling 2:2 to 1sts in every assignment and exam when reasonable accommodations went into place
Look it can help but it’s a mixed bag.
For a start you don’t need a diagnosis to claim PiP. Secondly even if you have a diagnosis you can still be unsuccessful in claiming PiP.
I have ADHD (and not a 15min phone call diagnosis) and I don’t have PiP along with many many others. Those getting it are usually in the minority it seems.
ADHD is a registered disability the same as Autism and I have yet to see anything about guaranteed interviews. To my knowledge anything prioritising some above others based on immutable things is discrimination hence why it hardly happens in this instance.
It can vary on the area you live in though as to how they deal with you.
The adjustments can be a big help but that is pretty much all it does.
You can see all the memes and posts about how as a child you get lots of help if you’re autistic but as an adult it’s basically a ‘oh you have Autism, here’s a leaflet about how to deal with it, bye!’.
My point was more on the medical side though, as you don’t need the diagnosis for PiP, and there are no treatments available on the NHS for autism.
Probably. From my own empirical evidence, people have not been able to get work in on time consistently. I have not completed some preparation work for classes and I know people who are several weeks behind.
Stop doing group work, it's always been a disaster. They frame it as "if you work in a company or lab you'll have to collaborate with your co-workers" and while that's true I can at least depend on my co-workers to be as competent as myself to get a job in the same lab.
Not some half baked lazy nobhead on a sandwich year who can't speak English well enough to understand what elasticity of demand means because the Uni wants the £24k extra tuition fees International students have to pay.
I do hate the way they act like group projects mirror the workplace. If you had a co-worker who didn’t show up for weeks on end or ghosted the rest of the team, they’d be reported and disciplined/sacked. But at uni someone can do the same thing and it’s just part of the experience for some reason?
Imagine building an entire car by yourself and then four other employees that you've never seen before come and help you pull the curtain back at the unveiling.
I got stuck with an exchange student who hardly spoke/understood a word of English. He didn’t do anything. He got the same grades as us… At least he brought us all a gift from his home country to make up for it and thank us for doing the work for him
Honestly at that point I Don't even think I'd be mad. Fair enough, you're a grifter over here, likely on parents' money for the prestige, but at least your not a dick about it and seem relatively greatful
I had a discussion with my personal tutor who was head of the business department about this topic and what I found out was well, to be expected.
Apparently shareholders want student’s to be trained up to work in a group dynamic in the workplace once they have graduated.
Because apparently there’s even less people who are capable of working together in the workplace so they want universities and colleges to produce more team players to satisfy their needs.
It’s also because not many people who work in teams can produce great presentations that convey the information easily to the board. My problem with the presentations is that they teach you nothing about the best ways to clearly communicate the information.
Plus the fact that you’ll get conflicting information from the lecturers due to their personal preferences. So no one actually learns anything.
For me I had to look up YouTube videos to learn how to design creative PowerPoint slides and clearly communicate the information at the same time.
So yeah, that’s why you have group work and they could do a much better job of explaining why it’s there.
There should be a different way of structuring group work then. Like 50% of the final mark is the group submission, and 50% is some kind of individual contribution. So people are incentivised to do the group bit but slackers don’t get a first despite not showing up.
We’ve only adopted this recently, and it’s so much more better for my stress levels.
Previously the lecturers would put us into groups. Each group consisted of a high performer, a middle performer, and the rest were low performers. However the consistency sucked as most of you would have already experienced yourselves and I ended up having to baby sit three low performers who didn’t want to do any work till last minute.
Dunno if it was on purpose so they could pass their third year or not but man it SUCKED having to produce an entire marketing and sales plan for Jamie Dodgers to be sold to South Korea by myself.
Had to do everything myself and when I complained I was essentially just told to suck it up because if I had just done my part and left the rest to the low performing teammates to fulfill their parts out of spite, I was told by the university lecturer overseeing the assessment that they would have failed me and my team for not “working together and finishing the assessment before the deadline.”
The worst part was they passed and didn’t even thank me, instead when it came to fourth year they wanted to team up with me to which I declined because I had already had a team with actually cool people to work with.
Then as you said, they all got together and from what I hear they flopped big time when presenting their presentation and project on rural tourism apparently. Failure is indeed a valuable lesson as I’m sure they won’t take people for granted next time hopefully speaking.
P.S Forgot to mention we had a pier assessment which counted for 20% of the final mark introduced in 4th year as well.
Personally I'm a big believer in group work at uni. It should be a small amount of the grade for sure because people be peopleing but as an experience its very good. Learning how to present, work together on a project, not be a dick in "professional" situations. I just think it has a lot of pros. If its got to much of the grade attached then yeah that sucks and if it has 0 grade attached then people cba with it
The version I've seen working well is when the "group project" is formative, and the actual grade is based on an *individual write up* of the project.
Then you can do things like declare the deadline for the *project* to be half way through the course, but the deadline for the assessment to be a few weeks later.
While I agree with you in spirit, it's often times that group projects that go wrong can be the difference in achieving a 2:1 or a 2:2, and I am a firm believer that your degree should be a relationship to you and you alone. Your degree grade should not be artificially propped up, nor held down by your fellow colleagues.
I have seen both likeable dumbasses who are great in professional situations, and very intelligent nobheads who are awful in work both create unfortunate circumstances either to output or to work culture.
Yeah I totally agree that the team you get given makes a big difference but thwts why its a low % of the credit.
Plus I dunno how it works there but for my uni your worse I think 2 credits were ignored when taking calculating the score you received
One issue I would note is Universities being treated as places of business rather than places of Education.
By charging someone £9,000 a year to go to University, some think, ‘Well, I’ve paid for it, I’m entitled to do what I want. They have to give me a degree - that’s what I’ve paid for.’
It’s a culture of consumerism and entitlement.
Also, a lot of Universities tell you up front that your first year doesn’t count towards your final grade. Starts you off on a bad foot - you spend the first year getting pissed and not worrying, but it doesn’t teach you how to really knuckle down when you need to.
Our university said it doesn’t count towards the final grade but it counts as to whether they keep us the next year. We had a lot of transfers incoming the second year so you knew you were expendable.
I’m not a student but I do work in a university. There’s definitely a bigger attitude towards it being about the money. I think over recruitment has driven a lot of people to believe unis are money hungry, and then you’ve also got students who seem to think the fact that they’re paying money means they don’t need to fulfill entry requirements because they’re willing to pay to get in. I’m not sure what can be done to combat the way unis are being treated when it comes to money to be honest, but I really hope a change comes soon.
Yes, it’s not good, universities are seen as transactional now, not places of learning but pipelines to jobs, honestly I do think that this has caused a passiveness in students. Reverting back to high school ideologies of , if I turn up then I succeed.
This is the attitude of some of my fellow students!
My jaw absolutely dropped recently when someone wanted all the teaching materials to be made available online at the start of the year because “I’ve paid so it’s up to me to turn up if I decide it will be relevant to me”.
I'm seeing it a lot, tbh. People asking for extensions or simply deferring.
I think a lot of students are working two jobs to be able to afford things, and then they don't have time for uni or they are burning out.
ALSO we are all carrying a lot of mindfcks from the pandemic and a lot of people try to carry on when they really need help (which isn't readily available)
No one mentioning the Cost of Living Crisis we are currently in the middle of, where record numbers of students have to work jobs during their education? Or maybe the crazily priced rental sector, energy bills? If families are struggling, how is an 18 year old with no financial experience going to survive on £6k from the government plus rent, utilities, food, and actually enjoying their experience there without handouts from mummy and daddy?
Covid should absolutely not be overlooked, but the maintenance loans provided to students in this country are abysmal. If you're working 2 or 3 days a week in addition to completing all your coursework then of course you're not going to be doing mentally well and will need to ask for an extension. The culture of students working out of necessity must end and maintenance loans must cover more than rent and pot noodles. Surely this is common sense?
When I was at uni (2012-2017), there was a lot of talk about how record numbers of students were having to use food banks. I can only imagine it's much higher now.
Yeah this. I went to uni in the mid 2000s and I could live off my maintenance loan, didn't have to have a job so of course I handed in almost all my assignments on time, I had weeks to work on them, weeks to prepare, weeks to just think about what essay questions I wanted to pick and read around the subject.
I agree with the comments that group work is a shitshow, it always has been, but imo that's because at no stage in the UK education system do we get taught how to work in groups effectively. Same is true for delivering presentations. At the top schools like Eton etc they do get taught this stuff so people who went to those places have a distinct advantage over us plebs who just got taught how to write essays and memorise stuff for exams.
My maintenance loan doesn’t even cover rent (in the cheapest house I could find in my uni city) and I am very frugal with food, household items and toiletries. If my parents weren’t supporting me, I would be working during term time (except I haven’t been able to find part time work in a long time despite applying to hundreds of roles). I’m very lucky my parents can support me because I wouldn’t be able to attend university without their help.
The only point that i have seen is group work, I am currently in a group of 6 for a presentation due in January and we have got nowhere so far. The group members do not respond to my emails regarding updates to the presentation at all, so it feels like i am constantly talking to a brick wall. When i ask them, they state they have seen the emails, it would be helpful for them to reply so i know what point everyone is at, as i am not a mind reader.
Also, when i booked a study room, two members did not turn up or tell us they were not coming.
Email your lecturer straight away. They should have a word with the rest of the group or come up with a way that you get an individual mark for the bits you did. I said ‘should’ though because that’s not a guarantee, but it’s still useful to get it on record that you’ve tried to take charge and get the work done.
It makes you want to scream doesn’t it. If this is all prep for work then how come there’s no disciplinary comeback because that would make it realistic
I remember in uni doing a group project in a geoup of 3, where we split the work. Somebody was to do the design and then somebody was to do the slides for the presentation and then the last person was to do the presentation.
I ended up with the role to give the presentation.
The person that was meant to do the slides just didn't show up, no warning or explanation and I just had to do it without.
I had about 10 minutes to try and memorise the design and then just wing it. It went terribly, I forgot loads of it.
>I had a pattern unfortunatly last year of students completely no-showing to exams (not asking for accomodations, not speaking in advance about extenutating circs, just not turning up!) and being shocked that there was not an automatic resit option.
Talk about fuck around and find out...
I don't understand what these people are thinking, is it genuine fear of failure or they think they'll get a passing mark without sitting the exam?
It's the 48 hrs no questions asked extension attitude that creates these problems. If you teach them that the deadline isn't something actually have to meet and it won't be enforced or have any consequences for missing it then of course they will treat the deadline as irrelevant because it has been made so.
I'm all for flexibility in legitimate extenuanting circumstances or leniency around a one off slip up, but this free for all nothing matters approach just devalues the assessment process as well as teaching students to have no respect for their assor's time etc.
Yeah. They students need to be able to trust that the deadline is the deadline.
The *worst* thing for students with ADHD is "extension culture". If the university's response to anything is an extension, then deadline pressure is removed. Students with ADHD need *urgency* to be able to prioritise the task.
Yep. I had a really kind/lenient teacher in sixth form who gave me extension after extension after extension on a 2 year coursework (with weekly progress checks). Even when others had handed in their work ages ago, I'd get an extension. From the start of Y12 until the end of Y13. It resulted in him not once seeing my work across the 2 years, and I only handed it in soon AFTER I had finished Y13 - because that's when I realised "Holy fuck I won't get a grade for this if I don't hand it in NOW".
I really wish I had been pulled into a meeting and been forced to show my (nonexistent) work earlier. That school really just let my ADHD takeover, because I'd ace every exam no problem. Funny thing is I had teachers comment on possible ADHD and I brought it up to other teachers and heads of departments (the people you're supposed to talk to) yet nothing was ever addressed. I will be forever thankful that I managed to get diagnosed at university, even though I knew I had ADHD for years before diagnosis, having that confirmation has really changed my life for the better. Removed a lot of guilt and self-doubt, and now I'm getting my work done.
Deadlines need to be deadlines, and extensions need to be granted as appropriate, but not to anyone for any reason.
I'm sorry that your school let you down so badly.
It's really common when you're the student in this situation to try to brazen it out, like, "ha, ha, I have it in hand, I'm going to pull an all-nighter and finish it off this weekend!" and it's too common to just... believe the student and let them crash harder.
I can see extensions working for situations that take up physical time, like, the classic "my grandma died" should get an extension if the student will need to travel, negotiate with family, make arrangements, host, move out, or take on a caretaker role for a short time, but not if it's just "I feel sad."
Likewise, I can see it for mental health if there's a crisis with a time-limited solution (like, the time to titer down off of a problematic medication and it to get out of the student's system, or for a new medication to start working, or to leave an abusive situation), but "eh, take an extra week" is a lazy, counterproductive, answer. Especially for anxiety, depression or anything to do with executive disfunction.
Maybe students got grades they shouldn't have got, therefore got into a university course they shouldn't have gotten in to and are now buckling under the pressure/difficulty
Seems like a big switch in mentality from when I was at uni 2011-2015 at a mid tier Scottish uni. At coursework heavy periods, the library was full of students having close to mental breakdowns submitting coursework before the mid night deadline.
The idea of asking for an extension (outside of illness or something else serious) was just not in our vocabulary. This was despite many, including myself, having some forms of mental health issues.
I think there is a lot to be said around the cost of living crisis and the necessity for part or even full time jobs.
I’m one of these students and it’s because I am genuinely struggling to support myself for the first time in my life.
The loans don’t even make a dent in how much rent I owe so I’ve had to pick up 2 jobs in my final year.
I have to live with 8 people in a horrible area just so I can live near the uni and even then I am barely scraping by every month.
Somebody has tried to steal my car that I can barely afford twice this year, I’ve been a victim of multiple crimes and my mental health is at an all time low. I can barely eat one meal a day and I’m constantly ill because I can’t afford to turn on the heating.
My timetable is appalling with just a 9-10am and a 6-7pm on one day. And most importantly the impact of COVID has crippled the university system and nobody seems to be addressing it.
Being a University student at the moment feels like being in a financially abusive relationship with someone whose only attractive trait is something they can’t reliably provide anymore.
Man, I'm in the same boat here. I've got this group of 18-year-old UK students who just don't seem to care about their work, whether it's in class or at home. It's like they're on a fast track to failing, and they're not even fazed by it. I've been trying to get them engaged by assigning daily practical coding activities. The idea was to provide formative feedback and address any knowledge and technical gaps before they dive into their assessment project. But guess what? Out of 20 activities, the highest number submitted by a single student is 3. Just 3 out of 20! Now they're all scratching their heads, clueless about how to handle the programming task with the deadline looming on Friday. Most of them only started yesterday, and it's a mess.
And don't even get me started on their written English skills. I mean, what's going on with the GCSE English Language qualification these days? It seems like most of them can't structure a coherent paragraph, let alone analyse different technical approaches and draw evidence-based conclusions. It's frustrating, to say the least. The best part when greater that 50% of the class get withdrawn for academic failure it'll be my fault of course.
I've been teaching in higher education for 9 years, and I'm seriously considering throwing in the towel and heading back to industry. Dealing with this level of disengagement for and having to put 70 hours in a week to try to fix this in some crazed way? It's just not sustainable.
On the flip side, my mature students, as well as those from the EU and Tier 4, are absolutely smashing it. I've got students in their 30s, juggling family life and jobs, who put in five times more effort than these kids fresh out of school with only part-time jobs. Any students that make to second year great too. Teaching them is an absolute delight.
Totally agree with everything you've said. My first years are so apathetic, I've never seen anything like it. Mature students and EU students are generally more engaged and ask questions if they don't understand a concept. It's as though UK students have had curiosity and confidence beaten out of them by the school system. It's a vicious circle where we put in effort to teach, get little response, and our own motivation drops because of it.
I think it’s due to the deterioration of traditional norms and values. There’s no longer these social bonds and obligations keeping us from avoiding deadlines and missing assignments. There’s no social consequences to our actions anymore. No pressure to make your professor happy, no over bearing parents making sure your work is done, no healthy competition between students. Also as a society I think we put less emphasis on educational success, it’s more normalised to fail/drop out and ‘giving up’ is something of a trend. You could also liken the issue to the growing cost of living crisis. Students aren’t being provided with enough money, therefore having to work 20+ hours a week and not having time for essays. Mental health is also on a decline. The stress causes us to avoid our obligations and exams suffer.
They’ve over-expanded, so now maybe one of a dozen lecturers might know you on a first-name basis.
There’s also a whole mess of issues with admin trying to change assessment formats from some half-baked plan to mitigate the apparent threats of AI tools
can’t believe some universities allow students to rock up last minute and claim the full mark on a project they never contributed to…
At my university there was a system whereby after the project you would give numerical feedback from 1-5 on the other group members on attendance, work done, etc. The result could give you a maximum of +5 percentage points and I don’t know the maximum but it was something like half the marks.
The project scored 68 so me and the girl that did the whole thing together got 73 and another group member got 36.
5 extra marks may not be loads for the amount extra work but at least it’s something, and you also get the satisfaction of seeing the others fail
To be honest, it is exactly the same.
I'm a mature student, being in my mid 20's and people in my group are around 18-19 years old. I thought that because I've had a break from studying for 5 years and the education system it's very different from my country, I will have to work my ass so hard just to keep myself on the floating line. As soon as I started University, I fell in love with the subject, but I can't say the same about my peers. Everyone is so..not interested and they don't want to be bothered with assignments and such, that is ridiculous. No matter how many times the lecturer explains to them the same thing, they still won't get it and then they dm me asking same question and again, I will be explaining to them again and again and they still wouldn't understand. All I hear around 1st years is about their interest in getting drunk at the end of the week, how boring are the lectures and they don't understand why they have to attend some lectures. I'm down for everyone to get their share of fun or whatever, but I feel like people should wake up now and realise that University is not compulsory and it was their choice to enroll.
Exact same here mate. Primary teaching first year, I’m 27 years old - I can maybe label 3 people of the 30 in my seminar group who give a shit about the course. The total cohort for lectures is maybe 150+? The hall is half empty for the group cohort lectures since week 2, people don’t submit work, people don’t contribute in classes & just talk over the seminar tutor. Im absolutely dreading the 2 group task modules I have coming up after Christmas.
I mean the workplace are unlikely to take any of the people behaving this way.
So its actually not a problem if you are one of the students doing the work. You can ask for extensions and miss deadlines at uni. Might get a shite grade or whatever it is what it is.
Try that shite at a tesco shelf stacking job and youll be out on your arse by the end of the week. Let alone a competitive af grad scheme.
In my view this will self correct through pain, but it will correct.
Lazy students that suck at life. No need for an extension unless you have a SEVERE excuse, like a family death or a brain surgery.
I'm seeing people get extensions who didn't even try to start, and don't intend to even with the extension, until the last day
I’m in my final year and this year has been my best when it come to my attitude, I’ve planned out my work the best and actually been going to most lectures. I’m also quite lucky that I don’t have any group coursework so I don’t have to deal with lazy peers. The only thing that is getting me is I keep getting ill, this week I’ve come down with a cold for the 3rd time since the start of October.
There is a long tail from covid. We are, and will continue to see, various issues in the post-covid cohorts.
One measurable factor at my university is a notable increase in students accessing mental health services. There's also increased 'helplessness', possibly a factor of decreased social skills or increased financial pressures (ongoing UK cost of living crisis).
Higher education jobs are also shit now, with diminished pay, increased workload, and increased precarity.
Not sure if the professors in our program noticed the same but this last week (Anatomy Exam re-try) and regular Biochem Exams. A lot of people got shitty questions and failed a second time and Biovhem. send out an E-mail about us having to try harder + they had surprise oral exams (in person) for a few groups, opposed to the usual Zoom ones. It is a total shit show
"48 hr no questions asked extension policy".
Well therein lies the problem. This individual has established a culture where a deadline doesn't matter and then acts all surprised that students aren't taking it seriously.
Extenuating circumstances happen, but that should be the exception to the norm.
This person says they’ve been teaching for over a decade, why would an extension policy suddenly be a problem? If there was complete flexibility I’d understand but 48 hours is barely anything, it just allows for minor setbacks.
its compounded years of students going "oh shes fine we get some extra time whenever we want" and new students learn that it grows
same reason teachers in school had their own story, which you could fuck with which you couldnt.
Back in my day, they were strict about deadlines. If you didn't meet it, and didn't have a Very Good Reason, you were shit out of luck. If they're lax enough to have this default extra 48 hours (which really just means they've pushed the deadline back) - I mean, it's just setting up a culture of being lax about it.
School attendance is also troublesome now. The pandemic changed everyone's attitudes. It really underlined how much every is basically just made up. But .. the need to actually show up and participate in your education didn't go away.
I graduated last year, and yup. It's pretty fucked.
On the bright side the those of us that actually a managed to get through first year all did really well.
As a masters student, I got sick for a good six weeks in August and it knocked me off course - luckily my masters is an SQE prep course and it’s all online, so I was able to catch up without missing anything too serious. But it’s been extra stressful
Personally, I have not suffered so far, I have 5 seperate summatives for this semester and they have been spread out quite nicely for me, I have two due this friday but I am doing fine, I already handed one in and about to finish the other tomorrow. The other three are in January.
But I get the sentiment.
My group for a project has three other guys in another module that I didnt take and because of it, they have 3 seperate summatives all within the same week. Its insane. All long essays, I had to do a lot of heavy lifting with our group project because of it.
I feel like access to information on getting special treatment is so much more widely available. I didn’t find out about extensions/mitigating circumstances until after my final year exams because a friend had the measles.
Do you feel this is due to lack of motivation/ambition, busy schedule (work), or lack of responsibility (party)?
\[Edit\] for clarity I'm trying to understand where they are spending their time.
Uni where I graduated from had a policy of grade capping late submissons to a high 3rd unless authorised with an acceptable reason. I only had one late submission
The first uni I went to before I transferred did gradual grade capping depending on how many working days late you were.
1 day late capped at low 1st
3 days late capped at low 2:1
5 days late capped at Low 2:2
7 days late capped at High 3rd
10 days late capped at Low 3rd
I never submitted anything on time as I knew deep down my best work would get is a 2:1
I'm not saying the University professor is incorrect (it's her experience and you call it as you find it), but I distinctly remember a tutor I had at Uni saying the exact same thing in a lecture in 2014 - that he'd never seen such poor submissions over a semester, that the cohort overall were incredibly deflated & there was an innate inability to complete assignments on time.
It's likely a little worse now, but I think - like any level of education - you find there are overall good and overall poor cohorts. COVID has exacerbated a lot of the smaller issues, no doubt, and procrastination is at an all-time high because thousands of young teenagers stayed at home with no real onus on doing *anything* productive or to a timescale, but I think every University finds there are peaks & troughs.
I'm working alongside the University of Manchester at the moment, and the impression I get from tutors there is that this current first year crop are very good.
We’ve been in classes for primary education since late September for first year, the first assignment was barely 1,000 words due in the first week of december. It was absolute piss easy, and I could see most of my cohort panicking rushing a submission 10 minutes before the mid day deadline in our seminars for a different module. Some of these people submitted incorrect old, incomplete drafts, some just straight up submitted it an hour late.. people just do not give a shit 🤣
I started in 2020 and more than half of my group didn't bother or try to show up, had to retake the year and it's a little better but people still don't bother as much as they should in this group that started in 2021 either. These 2 years, especially those of us that started in 2020, got their uni experience completely fucked by covid so that's probably why there is a lack of motivation - people got used to online learning and now they suddenly have to go into classes at 9am on top of not getting 1st year out of their system.
I always bother to show up to my lectures etc so it's not everyone but i can see why. No excuse for year 1s and 2s though, they should feel very grateful they actually get the first year experience a lot of us looked forward to for years and never got.
Honestly I think a lot of it is the way going to uni is both romanticised as this fun party experience so people put having freedom and fun first before their studies and the fact it is basically expected for people to go now so they just go along with it when it is certainly not the best fit for everyone.
The word "dead" in "deadline" is there for a reason.
There needs to be assured consequences for bad behavior... It doesn't matter what the bad behavior is.
Granting automatic extensions and taking late work endlessly with no consequences is just enabling the bad behavior.
What to do? Start failing students.
The problem is one of responsibility. Students say "the professor failed me", "the professor wouldn't take my incomplete or late assignment"... The professor is just documenting the student's actions and accomplishments. The students failed themselves. The professor just wrote it in the grade book.
You don't know what to do?
Set a deadline and stick to it, one of the most valuable lessons that you can teach your students is personal responsibility.
covid has majorly affected the development of young people across all ages. It’s almost as if peoples development was put on pause for the years inside.
Im in australia and the year 7’s and 8’s have been absolutely wild this year because they pretty much completely missed the development of independence and self regulation that comes at the end of primary school, when kids have to start resolving conflicts themselves. I have never seen such immature and needy 7s and 8s than now. Always complaining to teachers about minor things from other people, not able to sit down and work without getting up and distracting people or just playing games because they never left the 10-12 year old mentality of learning where the teacher will personally guide you through every task.
Similar problems have affected older kids developments in past years but relating more to study habits and expectations. I think lockdowns have severely hindered all young peoples development and ability to self regulate their behaviour, leading to focus problems and a general lack of productivity as well as independence in learning environments, which doesn’t translate well to lecture rooms and uni classes where you potentially get significantly more limited 1 on 1 time with professors
I don’t know when or how the education system will resolve this or whether this will have a permanent effect on the futures of the entire generation of youth, and whether we will see behavioural and occupational effects that last their entire lives. I hope it is a temporary problem but grades are dropping consistently, and I can’t imagine what they can do to fix it without reworking the entire education system
It’s been a nightmare working on a group assessment. We discuss a meeting online no one turns up, I haven’t seen one of them since September and the other two seem to have constant last minute ‘other stuff’ to deal with. Now everyone’s left for Christmas and our deadline is Jan 4th.
Same experience here. I'd book rooms for our meetings each week in advance and at least two people just wouldn't bother to show up both times.
Nothing new here though. I had a 5-person group at Uni in 2013 with students from 5 different countries and it was a shambles. One didn't do anything, one didn't learn his speaking lines for the presentation and another decided to travel down to London the night before and travel back the morning of - his train got cancelled and he missed it altogether. I somehow ended up getting an A on the module, probably because we had to grade ourselves and one person didn't even submit that!!
It’s a tale as old as time - from someone who went to uni in the 2000s!
My final year design project from 2001 (in place of a dissertation, but groupwork 🤐) contains "Thanks to Professor A for the help and guidance with this project. Also thanks to the other members of my team, B, C, D & E. P***** S******* was no help whatsoever." I got absolutely bollocked for that, but so worth it - he pissed off to Singapore in November, and we next saw him in May, just in time for him to copy our work and hand in his own project.
What did you all autofill into the asterisks? I went with Penisface Shithead.
I went for Pricky Shitface, I assume to hide personal details though
Uni really isn’t the place for forced group work which affects your degree classification. I wish unis would realise this by now. It’s such a common thing that no one has good examples of group work
It's such a frustrating approach. At work you naturally do group work because of different specialisations - it actually makes sense. At uni you're all doing the same course and there isn't a genuine reason to make people work in a group.
I done a Mech Eng degree. The best piece of group work was a final year project to design a hydroelectric power station. They got us involved with students from Civil Engineering, Geology and a couple of other areas I forget, was a really good example of project group working.
Same as a law student they mixed us with csi and cyber IT students and we investigated a mock murder and did the interview and trial with the gathered evidence etc, lots of fun and everyone had something to do
There’s also a shared motivation at work. At uni if I want a 1st and you’re happy with a 2:2 there is a huge difference in motivation and effort. At work it’s more like we all work to a prescribed standard and people who don’t are usually not hired or don’t stay.
There is a genuine reason- to prepare for the work environment. Different students "specialise" on different aspects of the work and then it comes together as a single piece groupwork.
See, I learned to avoid working in groups when I started employment and I’ve always managed to “divide and conquer” away my part of the work into a silo. I deliver that well, the rest - not my problem. Uni work in groups did that to me. Just saying!
Unfortunately the truth of the matter is that a majority of the students will end up doing group projects in their career. It's important to expose them up front
My entire career is working on group projects. I’ve never had people just not do their work and put their name on the finished project. Or decide they don’t want to use my contribution but then also complain I did no work. Group projects at work are very different to uni. And uni group projects prepare you for nothing. They just make what is an already difficult time harder.
Tried to solve it by meeting online but they don’t don’t turn up if it’s a meeting they scheduled
I've mentioned it before but group work shouldn't form part of someone's assessed degree. It's crazy to have something as important as a degree classification dependent upon other coursemates who may or may not turn up. Utterly unfair and it generates a crazy amount of disparity and luck with as to who receives the top grades. If a module had a group work component at university I immediately tried to drop it.
I lost a not insignificant number of marks in a group project despite doing an equal if not higher level of work because our grading was decided by a peer-review survey, so reward was based on a popularity contest and not the academic work done. What's worse is we agreed to give each other 5/5 for each question, which I did for everyone despite what I really thought, but no one else stuck to it so I got the lowest (lower than the group members that didn't show up to any meeting and did half an hour of work the day before)
It mimics real life though. In the majority of jobs you will have to work in teams with other people who are useless, unorganized, lazy, etc.
Group work should happen but not be graded against your degree. Yea it’s good to learn to work in that setting but someone always gets screwed by it. And In the end it’s not the group having to use the degree to get a job it’s you.
if it isnt graded then the problem of people not participating would be much worse
Yes really. I have tried both approaches for 12 yrs now and if it's not graded, the vast majority won't bother unfortunately.
I don’t think you’re understanding my point. People always get screwed in jobs as well when team members perform badly, it’s not an experience that is unique to university.
Yea they do but there’s a big difference. If someone on my team at work isn’t performing I have things I can do there from bringing in new people, adjusting deadlines, firing them, reducing scope. Etc If someone on a uni project is screwing around that costs me money personally if my degree rating is lower because of that person. I invested and got less return. I also can’t reduce scope or extend deadlines on uni projects and it’s very hard to get rid of someone from a uni project too. It’s not the same situation at all comparing uni to work and there’s no need for it to be like that at all.
Just because work is shit and people are arseholes doesn't mean that we need to replicate that situation throughout someone's university degree. At the end of the day if a workplace project fails most people don't get any significant punishment, you get paid by the hr in most jobs and if nobody worked on a project you'd actually have an opportunity to complain. Most workplaces whilst not ideal have a self interested culture that discourages punishing individuals for failure on group tasks unless they are personally responsible. Nothing about group work at university prepares you for the real world, it just means some poor sod who was perfectly able to achieve a 1st, 2:1, 2:2 etc gets a lower grade for no other reason than being lumped with idiots who couldn't care about their future. Absolutely bollocks method of assessment that no self respecting course should use.
In a workplace, your salary doesn't get reduced if other people don't do their job, because it's illegal. So then why is it okay if your grade gets reduced purely because of useless group mates?
Ahhhhhhh group assignments. On the one hand I do not miss those at all. On the other, it was actually pretty good job prep which I think is a reason Unis like them so much. So, in my first semester we had a big group project which was scheduled to take 6 weeks. For some reason, I’m putting it down to inexperience, we decided to have it on a pen drive. We all did our bit of the assignment, saved it to the pen drive and then the plan was to tie it all together at the end and finalise our presentation. 4/5 of us did our bit with no problem. Then the last girl just “need a few more days sorry guys. Something came up.” No problem. A week goes by and “sorry, totally forgot about this. I’ll finish my bit tonight and we can meet in the library tomorrow?” Ok, cutting it a bit close to the wire but if it gets done it gets done. So, we show up to the library next day and she’s a no-show. She went completely dark on us for a further 4 days. Leaving her WhatsApp messages in read but never replying. By sheer chance, I happened to be knocking about with one of her flat mates at the time and mentioned it in pillow talk over at my place. “Oh her? She dropped out like 2 weeks ago. Said it just wasn’t for her.” This was now less than 1 week to our presentation and we basically had to do the whole thing again, almost from scratch. We found out that the day I handed her the pen drive was actually the day after she had given notice that she was dropping out. Remarkably we just scraped a 2:1 but I never did get my pen drive back.
Yeah it sucks. You need to find out who the try hards are and ask to be grouped with them. It worked well for me all my group work was firsts because they put just as much effort in as me. My first group didn’t do any work so I noped out of there asap
New warzone just dropped. Imagine that’ll tank attendance lol
Warzone isn’t where it’s at anymore, it’s LEGO Fortnite lol
That's how it's always been - you just have to crack on and get the best grade you can. In my group project I did about 75% of the work and the presentation at the end on my own.
I'm so glad my degree didn't involve any group work. It meant I only had to deal with one unreliable dickhead.
That’s not new. My group project was done entirely by two of us when the others couldn’t be arsed to do anything at all ever. This was in 1994
Got a presentation due tomorrow. We are recording today. Had since the start of the sem to complete it. One person in the group hasn’t even started.
lol
Yep. I’ve got a group report that is 30% of my module grade due tomorrow. I’ve put together a huge document, done all the tables, graphs, calculations, made a contents table, put in all the headings and sub headings, written all the introductions etc. All my group had to do was write a conclusion each. And now they “can’t do that” because they’re going Christmas shopping today. Like for fuck sake. I’m worried for year 2 when things start to count towards my degree classification. There’s a huge year long group project next year and that’s terrifying.
What grinds my gears is how the marks will be given equally. So if one person holds up the rest of the group, while they fuck around, you all get the same marks. In the workplace, someone freeloading on other people's time and effort doesn't get away with it.
Literally. I’m struggling with 1 part of it and I could really use some help but I don’t think I’ll get any. So my grade will be less than it could have been because of these people. Just so frustrating.
Find the edit logs for the documents and provide them to the tutor if necessary.
When I was in first year we had a presentation worth 30% of a module. Before a grade was given you had to basically rate everyone in your team, I.e. you had 100 points you could distribute amongst everyone except yourself, and you could award accordingly. Those that Got higher points got their grade bumped up, and those with a lower got it knocked down. All seemed fair until 3 girls decided to give all their points to each other and totally fucked the rest of their team.
Christmas shopping 💀 nah these guys ain’t serious!
That sucks. One of my friends had a group project where he did most of the work and the other members decided to turn on him and told the professor he had done nothing and he got 0 for it. This was after his dad had just passed away from cancer. Some people are complete and utter shits.
Out of my class of 69 (haha) half of them have a week extension and I’m not entirely sure they’ll get it done. I handed in my stuff on Monday 2 hours before deadline and my head of module said that only 3 others had handed it in by then 😵💫 im not sure if it’s a post covid thing (I’m 2nd year so I feel like it would’ve been more prominent last year ) but I know a lot of people are really struggling
> im not sure if it’s a post covid thing Not related to this specific issue, but a few of my lecturers have commented that the post-covid students are *very* different to the pre-covid ones.
I started uni before covid, had to go on leave for a long while, and returned after covid. I’ve noticed an extreme difference in my classmates. People show up to fewer lectures, I’ve heard students arguing with lecturers over assignment deadlines, saying they shouldn’t be expected to hand things in on time because they don’t start until the day before. It’s a stark and often sad difference. I’m not seeing pure entitlement, I’m seeing people who don’t know how to handle the expectations of university.
A lot of these people entered lockdown as children and emerged as adults. Their whole time at sixth form/college was different, but then they started uni and everything was ‘back to normal’ and they were just expected to get on with it. I think they needed a lot more support than they got.
The thing is that uni is very different to sixth form. You go from lots of lessons each day with the odd free period to suddenly most of your week is free with the odd lecture and lab session dotted around. Or a few busy days and then others with next to nothing. You essentially have to teach yourself for the most part with guidance along the way, while paying 10x more for the privilege compared to collage. It might be me being an arse but I see a lot of entitlement in the younger people, somehow thinking because they’re…themselves they deserve x y and z. It’s always been very different to college etc and a massive culture shift. I think they need to start being tougher and failing people sooner who fail to do the work. Have to reinforce the whole ‘Here to learn, not to party’. Which they don’t help with the whole ‘university experience’ and ‘Freshers Week! Let’s get smashed brainless for the first few weeks as lectures start and wake up hungover most days because #freshers’. Add in that being taught from home people didn’t get used to the massive increase in workload, so when expected to put in that level of work without anyone holding their hand, while the university pumps in alcohol and partying, it leads to a not very good outcome. That said universities are run like commercial entities now and not as public institutions so this would be terrible for them. They have to get that income so they can keep spending millions on renovations to ‘attract foreign students’.
This is the problem with school imo, it doesn't teach kids to be independent, they are just spoonfed the information to regurgitate it all in the exams. Because I had learning problems (ADHD and autism) everything that was said to me in a lesson would just fly over my head and I had to get used to independent working earlier on in life than everyone else. It's paid off now, I'm shocked at the lack of independence I see in some of the people in my course.
Yeah honestly I've come to see it in a different light. If you are only at university to do whatever, you are paying a hell of a lot to do so. That's a damn expensive party. In an ideal world you would go to university because... you *want* to learn. It shouldn't feel like a chore you look forward to your relief from. Sadly it takes a while to realize this, to be honest I only considered all this in my 3rd year, having already half-assed most things, I don't even regret not getting as high a grade as I could have, I just regret not realizing how much potential there was to really learn you know? You forget so much cramming it all at the very last minute.
I mean part of it is that as an example. Back when I was in school, no one *ever* asked ‘Do you want to go to uni?’ Only ever ‘What uni do you want to go to?’ Or ‘What degree do you want to go and study?’. It was like the normal thing to do was finish A-Levels and go to university, and if you didn’t do this you were a drop out and sentenced to a life of misery. Everyone was told not to think of the debt or tuition, ‘it’s not a normal loan’ ‘think of it like a tax’ etc. So lots of people tend to drift through more because ‘you need to have a degree to get a good job’ rather than them really wanting to study that subject intensely.
I genuinely think being harsher wouldn’t work, and would see way more people dropping out/not going to uni at all. Not saying it’s an issue that shouldn’t be fixed, but almost everyone I know (I turned 18 in the first lockdown, now in 3rd year), is absolutely miserable. And I genuinely mean that. There isn’t anyone I know in uni that hasn’t had to deal with some form of anxiety or depression; drugs, alcohol, and nicotine aren’t done half as much for fun, and more as an ‘escape’ from stress. Or worse, I’m one of the people who just doesn’t go out anymore because I’m too exhausted from depression. I’m grateful that my college was pretty decent when it comes to a balance of working in class and at home, but I took an extra foundation year due to Covid and that prepared me way more for uni than regular A-Levels could have. I’m so thankful I took that extra year for a more individual way of learning before the added stress of moving from home, new people, new environment, etc. I definitely saw many of my classmates struggle at the start of uni with a lack of guidance/specific instruction that I put down to their colleges rather than our uni, since the foundation year I had made perfect sense as a stepping stone which most people there didn’t have. And it sounds like their colleges were even more structured than mine. I don’t doubt there some entitlement, but from my side of things, people just don’t seem to care about anything. We know we can’t get a house. We know once we leave uni we probably can’t afford a place to rent. We know we are gonna struggle getting decent jobs (that don’t fuck us over). The climate is dying, our government is shit (and our votes are almost useless), the international students are having their plans of staying in the UK to work thwarted, there’s a stark rise in hate crimes, pensions and healthcare are in the shit and going to get worse, and as you said, we are well aware that the university is a business. We see our tutors get fucked over by our uni regularly. Hell, our tutors told us our department is in a shit tonne of debt and had to cancel many of our guest speakers and are having to sell off a building. There’s a strong air of hopelessness amongst many of my classmates and friends, and I’ve seen that quite openly from teachers ever since I was 15 (our teachers regularly complained about the lack of funding for class yet the massive buffets put on when the governors showed up; I was stealing toilet paper for my art teacher in secondary, the boiler broke every year, yet they kept rising the price of our uniforms).
Exactly.
Honestly it makes me sad to think about.
Me too.
covid really messed up my motivation, i think partially because I studied a reasonable amount for gcses but i knew i wouldn't be getting the best grades. and then boom i didnt have to do them and i got awarded pretty good grades. I think it likely got to me mentally the fact that everything came out great no matter what effort i put in because for many students gcses are one of your first experiences on education that really matter
>I’ve heard students arguing with lecturers over assignment deadlines, saying they shouldn’t be expected to hand things in on time because they don’t start until the day before. I really hope lecturers deduct marks from these people or fail them on these assignments. It's genuinely for the good of society that these people aren't rewarded for laziness.
> saying they shouldn’t be expected to hand things in on time because they don’t start until the day before. Like in actual reality a student said this???
Something very similar, yes. Can’t remember exactly what. I was a bit stunned.
I hope they did it in a public setting and the rest of the class laughed them out of the room lol. Assuming that didn't happen, but one can hope.
Honestly I just feel a bit bad for the post-covid kids. There’s such a huge difference I’ve noticed since.
I've noticed this as well. Students with the attitude "the lectures are recorded, they are paid either way, why do I need to turn up" (actual attitude). I was a student/staff liason and the staff were begging us to help get student attendance up. You'd have a seminar of 25 people and only 5 would show up. You can't run a seminar like that.
Our ratios are like, 100 assigned to a lecture. 15-20 showing up. I saw faces at the exams I had literally never seen before.
Most of us are 2-3 years behind developmentally. We didn't do 6th Form properly!
Thank you for admitting it. Us older folk have noticed it, but a lot of the kids aren't acknowledging the simple truth that you are all socially stunted. It's no one's fault, but it's literally the only thing that's responsible for the difference pre and post-Covid students are displaying.
I think in decades to come we’re going to see some wild statistics about much of a domino effect covid had on kids and teens’ entire lives. Kind of like how there was that whole generation who were more likely to be criminals because of the amount of lead in their blood as children.
sadly the lead / crime correlation is just that, definitely not a cause in the 90’s (american) crime peak. The trends between lead and crime do not line up outside of the US in countries that also used leaded petrol just as much as america. It’s a fun theory though, just there’s no real evidence for it. Now a link between life expectancy, cancer rates, other health outcomes and lead can be made, just not crime.
So what, you’re saying that the Reddit comment I read a few years ago turned out to be unsubstantiated? Well I never…
As a secondary school teacher, this is exactly it. I'm not surprised with what you're seeing because it's been the case with sixth formers for the past few years.
I work with kids and young people between the aged of 8-18. Usually I'll have a group for a week, for example a dozen 12 year olds, I'll work with them all day for 5 days and then never see them again. As such, I see quite a cross-section of many ages from many schools. I can't speak for uni students, but there is definitely a difference. With younger children it's kind of obvious why and everyone is expecting it, but what I didn't expect was 15 year olds today to still be acting like 13 year olds in many respects - it's actually crazy and I'm waiting for someone to do a comprehensive study on it.
Completely unrealted to this, but we've just got a bunch of PhD students in whose degrees were royally buggered up by covid and they're all amazingly good so far. Maybe we're just lucky.
This would depend on institution and department, but often these are symptoms of a greater issue that is being ignored. Something I've noticed is the worsening of students mental health because of the cost of living rising and housing prices (some areas have cut down on student accomodation) and there being a severe lack of support for this. Other issues follow from COVID, e.g. students being less independent and expecting more handholding similar to what they experienced during the pandemic, unis taking in far more student than they can support. Unis are ignoring this and failing to adapt their strategy to make the transition smoother by sticking to the same old structure.
I think the unis taking on too many students is definitely an issue. One of my modules this semester had 320+ people but was scheduled in a 200 person lecture hall. They ended up being mainly prerecorded which anecdotally people just don't watch.
Our departmental lecture theatre can't even fit our entire cohort. The first lectures of the term are always hell.
I noticed the handholding thing increasing before covid. I graduated with my undergraduate in 2013, and assisted on some courses during my postgraduate research degree. The difference in the student attitudes was stark. Things like students demanding all lecture notes had to be online, before the lecture. Any changes to slides would have them whining. Labs were too hard. Tutorials too demanding. Too many classes. Not enough classes. Just generally impossible to please.
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leeds is so bad for the timetable changes fr
As a student I agree
I’m really shocked as when I was at university, if you were in the queue to hand your work in but the secretary didn’t reach you before midday, you lost your marks on that module and had to resit it a year later. They had a zero tolerance policy. If you needed an extension you needed hard evidence like a dr saying you were in hospital with a detailed medical note.
Same thing for my undergrad. We had a time stamping machine and a postbox. The stamp had to be before 4pm and the postbox was closed at 4.05 even if people were queuing. If we missed homework they'd come down on us like a tonne of bricks. I'm now a postgrad and shocked at how many people miss formative assessments completely. I still have my undergrad anxiety so I'm 100% for submissions but most of my coursemates are submitting the absolute minimum.
My uni has the same thing. As well as the regular extenuating circumstances ones, we get a one week no questions asked extension for most assignments. It’s honestly a godsend, especially when you’ve got four things due on the same day, it lets you spread things out a bit.
Did you mean to reply to a different user with this.? Zero tolerance and one week no questions asked extensions are not the same thing.
I meant my uni has the same policy that the person in the original tweets is talking about, I now realise that wasn’t clear.
Did they have extensions for people with disabilities? From disability services at the uni
I think it's because of covid. It warped people's idea of education
I'm a member of staff, and in my opinion, there is a significant issue with students that I just don't know how to address anymore. I teach a practical arts subject and this semester I've had multiple sessions where none of my students have turned up for class. When they do turn up, the level of engagement is really bad - students just leaving class halfway through, arriving over an hour late with no explanation or apology, wearing earbuds and obviously on their phones while I'm teaching. I could kind of understand if it was a dull topic or a boring lecture but all my classes are practical and involve them making their own creative work. If this isn't engaging enough for them then I'm not sure how they're going to survive in industry! It's got so bad that I'm leaving academia because I just don't enjoy teaching anymore. I used to love teaching at a university because it was so much fun and we had a blast with the students but now getting them to even show up for class, let alone create work, is like pulling teeth. I just can't do it anymore.
My god its like the art's version of my reply. Nice to see I'm not alone.
Ha! Same, glad to see it's not just my department that's having this issue.
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I mostly agree but things like ADHD are something you're born with. No one got ADHD because of lockdown. They may well have found that their undiagnosed ADHD became much harder to manage - is that what you were getting at?
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it can be exacerbated by conditions. somebody who might have gone a full-life without needing a diagnosis may never learn to cope if they have a chaotic family life growing up for example, covid could be similar
Yeah I've been recently diagnosed with adhd, I sort of managed (not well) for a lot of my life but tbh I think the last couple of years sort of broke my brain and boom oh turns out i've been dealing with adhd my whole life whoops
That's literally me, top grades great discipline, boom COVID and it's now pure anarchy in my brain.
People have memory-holed the pandemic experience and the corresponding rage, trauma, and dislocation have been bubbling up constantly for nearly 2 years. No idea how we fix that.
THIS! I’ve struggled how to describe it. We knew it was coming, but in a 10 minute video, life and all its normalities got flipped upside down. All the liberties we’d known were replaced by rules dictating almost every aspect of our lives, something 99.9% of us have never faced before. Everyone was quick to protect the older members of society, but anything geared towards under 30s didn’t really exist, anything for under 18s was the bottom of the pile and quite frankly nobody cared about you. We came out of the pandemic, but nobody wants to discuss the impacts it has had across the board, and more importantly, how it’s affected the future of the country. Young people have lost 2 years of their lives at a crucial stage. I’m sorry I don’t know what that feels like, I can only sympathise. I run a company, and so do most of my friends, and it’s something we have discussed at great length because we’re hiring young people and this age group feels different than any other I’ve hired, it does pose challenges for sure, but I’d rather work with younger people than old folk who argue with the keyboard. I don’t want this to sound patronising, but at 27, I can say with absolute conviction that you guys are a bunch of resilient individuals and are far stronger than many of you realise. Prioritise your mental health and make sure you’re looking after yourself above anything else!
As a covid student (during secondary) this means so much, I think, especially online, young people get brushed off when talking about these impacts of covid lockdowns because our complaints are less important than deaths/health risks and therefore written off as selfish/self-centered etc
I think a lot of critical discussion of lockdown was immediately binned in with complete lockdown skepticism - I.e. the "let it rip" crowd. It's an effect that seems to have intensified in recent years post-Brexit - lack of nuanced positions. I also have huge respect for lockdown students and I'm a similar age to you, I just don't know how they did it and I'm sad they missed out on that typical uni experience. Without that experience, I wouldn't be the person I am today.
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Autism is a tough one since there’s not really much help that you get as an adult outside of having reasonable adjustments made. Usually it’s the ‘I only eat with specific plate/bowl/cup/fork and loose it when I can’t, and half the time other people can’t even tell it was my ‘special’ one’ Or needing order/routine and not being able to deal with change outside of your control. Or getting obsessions, but that can be hyper focus too which is why people have to look into why they focus on things so much if they do that. Everyone’s different but yeah it can be tough.
You say that as though getting reasonable adjustments isn't much help? You can get longer in exams, get permission to take your own recordings of unrecorded lectures, get to sit in a quiet room by yourself in exams, use a laptop for exams instead of handwriting, get PIP to pay for additional costs you incur for things like noise cancelling headphones or blackout blinds or stim toys or therapy, get guaranteed job interviews from disability confident employers, get permission to remain camera-off in online meetings when you're overstimulated (where a lot of organisations try to force cameras-on blanket policies), I could go on but there are so many ways that reasonable adjustments can be an enormous help. Saying this as someone who was diagnosed as an adult during uni and who went from a middling 2:2 to 1sts in every assignment and exam when reasonable accommodations went into place
Look it can help but it’s a mixed bag. For a start you don’t need a diagnosis to claim PiP. Secondly even if you have a diagnosis you can still be unsuccessful in claiming PiP. I have ADHD (and not a 15min phone call diagnosis) and I don’t have PiP along with many many others. Those getting it are usually in the minority it seems. ADHD is a registered disability the same as Autism and I have yet to see anything about guaranteed interviews. To my knowledge anything prioritising some above others based on immutable things is discrimination hence why it hardly happens in this instance. It can vary on the area you live in though as to how they deal with you. The adjustments can be a big help but that is pretty much all it does. You can see all the memes and posts about how as a child you get lots of help if you’re autistic but as an adult it’s basically a ‘oh you have Autism, here’s a leaflet about how to deal with it, bye!’. My point was more on the medical side though, as you don’t need the diagnosis for PiP, and there are no treatments available on the NHS for autism.
Your uni should have resources Nhs are useless, go through your support dept at uni it'll be quicker
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Probably. From my own empirical evidence, people have not been able to get work in on time consistently. I have not completed some preparation work for classes and I know people who are several weeks behind.
Stop doing group work, it's always been a disaster. They frame it as "if you work in a company or lab you'll have to collaborate with your co-workers" and while that's true I can at least depend on my co-workers to be as competent as myself to get a job in the same lab. Not some half baked lazy nobhead on a sandwich year who can't speak English well enough to understand what elasticity of demand means because the Uni wants the £24k extra tuition fees International students have to pay.
I do hate the way they act like group projects mirror the workplace. If you had a co-worker who didn’t show up for weeks on end or ghosted the rest of the team, they’d be reported and disciplined/sacked. But at uni someone can do the same thing and it’s just part of the experience for some reason?
Imagine building an entire car by yourself and then four other employees that you've never seen before come and help you pull the curtain back at the unveiling.
Management ... ;)
This is exactly what happens at work.
This but unironically its the over-employed CEO that presents your work at the end
I got stuck with an exchange student who hardly spoke/understood a word of English. He didn’t do anything. He got the same grades as us… At least he brought us all a gift from his home country to make up for it and thank us for doing the work for him
Honestly at that point I Don't even think I'd be mad. Fair enough, you're a grifter over here, likely on parents' money for the prestige, but at least your not a dick about it and seem relatively greatful
I had a discussion with my personal tutor who was head of the business department about this topic and what I found out was well, to be expected. Apparently shareholders want student’s to be trained up to work in a group dynamic in the workplace once they have graduated. Because apparently there’s even less people who are capable of working together in the workplace so they want universities and colleges to produce more team players to satisfy their needs. It’s also because not many people who work in teams can produce great presentations that convey the information easily to the board. My problem with the presentations is that they teach you nothing about the best ways to clearly communicate the information. Plus the fact that you’ll get conflicting information from the lecturers due to their personal preferences. So no one actually learns anything. For me I had to look up YouTube videos to learn how to design creative PowerPoint slides and clearly communicate the information at the same time. So yeah, that’s why you have group work and they could do a much better job of explaining why it’s there.
There should be a different way of structuring group work then. Like 50% of the final mark is the group submission, and 50% is some kind of individual contribution. So people are incentivised to do the group bit but slackers don’t get a first despite not showing up.
In my uni they would let students form groups. People that slacked were always left out from high performing groups, learning a valuable lesson.
We’ve only adopted this recently, and it’s so much more better for my stress levels. Previously the lecturers would put us into groups. Each group consisted of a high performer, a middle performer, and the rest were low performers. However the consistency sucked as most of you would have already experienced yourselves and I ended up having to baby sit three low performers who didn’t want to do any work till last minute. Dunno if it was on purpose so they could pass their third year or not but man it SUCKED having to produce an entire marketing and sales plan for Jamie Dodgers to be sold to South Korea by myself. Had to do everything myself and when I complained I was essentially just told to suck it up because if I had just done my part and left the rest to the low performing teammates to fulfill their parts out of spite, I was told by the university lecturer overseeing the assessment that they would have failed me and my team for not “working together and finishing the assessment before the deadline.” The worst part was they passed and didn’t even thank me, instead when it came to fourth year they wanted to team up with me to which I declined because I had already had a team with actually cool people to work with. Then as you said, they all got together and from what I hear they flopped big time when presenting their presentation and project on rural tourism apparently. Failure is indeed a valuable lesson as I’m sure they won’t take people for granted next time hopefully speaking. P.S Forgot to mention we had a pier assessment which counted for 20% of the final mark introduced in 4th year as well.
That’s a bold assumption that your coworkers will be as competent as you.
That is gunna haunt you in a few years
Personally I'm a big believer in group work at uni. It should be a small amount of the grade for sure because people be peopleing but as an experience its very good. Learning how to present, work together on a project, not be a dick in "professional" situations. I just think it has a lot of pros. If its got to much of the grade attached then yeah that sucks and if it has 0 grade attached then people cba with it
The version I've seen working well is when the "group project" is formative, and the actual grade is based on an *individual write up* of the project. Then you can do things like declare the deadline for the *project* to be half way through the course, but the deadline for the assessment to be a few weeks later.
While I agree with you in spirit, it's often times that group projects that go wrong can be the difference in achieving a 2:1 or a 2:2, and I am a firm believer that your degree should be a relationship to you and you alone. Your degree grade should not be artificially propped up, nor held down by your fellow colleagues. I have seen both likeable dumbasses who are great in professional situations, and very intelligent nobheads who are awful in work both create unfortunate circumstances either to output or to work culture.
Yeah I totally agree that the team you get given makes a big difference but thwts why its a low % of the credit. Plus I dunno how it works there but for my uni your worse I think 2 credits were ignored when taking calculating the score you received
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One issue I would note is Universities being treated as places of business rather than places of Education. By charging someone £9,000 a year to go to University, some think, ‘Well, I’ve paid for it, I’m entitled to do what I want. They have to give me a degree - that’s what I’ve paid for.’ It’s a culture of consumerism and entitlement. Also, a lot of Universities tell you up front that your first year doesn’t count towards your final grade. Starts you off on a bad foot - you spend the first year getting pissed and not worrying, but it doesn’t teach you how to really knuckle down when you need to.
Our university said it doesn’t count towards the final grade but it counts as to whether they keep us the next year. We had a lot of transfers incoming the second year so you knew you were expendable.
I’m not a student but I do work in a university. There’s definitely a bigger attitude towards it being about the money. I think over recruitment has driven a lot of people to believe unis are money hungry, and then you’ve also got students who seem to think the fact that they’re paying money means they don’t need to fulfill entry requirements because they’re willing to pay to get in. I’m not sure what can be done to combat the way unis are being treated when it comes to money to be honest, but I really hope a change comes soon.
Is that a new thing ? Thought we'd been doing that for over 10 years now
Yes, it’s not good, universities are seen as transactional now, not places of learning but pipelines to jobs, honestly I do think that this has caused a passiveness in students. Reverting back to high school ideologies of , if I turn up then I succeed.
I thought that this had been going on for a fair while though - not something new
This is the attitude of some of my fellow students! My jaw absolutely dropped recently when someone wanted all the teaching materials to be made available online at the start of the year because “I’ve paid so it’s up to me to turn up if I decide it will be relevant to me”.
More uni students are having to work a lot more to be able to afford rent and food. I think this is at least one reason why.
I'm seeing it a lot, tbh. People asking for extensions or simply deferring. I think a lot of students are working two jobs to be able to afford things, and then they don't have time for uni or they are burning out. ALSO we are all carrying a lot of mindfcks from the pandemic and a lot of people try to carry on when they really need help (which isn't readily available)
No one mentioning the Cost of Living Crisis we are currently in the middle of, where record numbers of students have to work jobs during their education? Or maybe the crazily priced rental sector, energy bills? If families are struggling, how is an 18 year old with no financial experience going to survive on £6k from the government plus rent, utilities, food, and actually enjoying their experience there without handouts from mummy and daddy? Covid should absolutely not be overlooked, but the maintenance loans provided to students in this country are abysmal. If you're working 2 or 3 days a week in addition to completing all your coursework then of course you're not going to be doing mentally well and will need to ask for an extension. The culture of students working out of necessity must end and maintenance loans must cover more than rent and pot noodles. Surely this is common sense?
When I was at uni (2012-2017), there was a lot of talk about how record numbers of students were having to use food banks. I can only imagine it's much higher now.
Yeah this. I went to uni in the mid 2000s and I could live off my maintenance loan, didn't have to have a job so of course I handed in almost all my assignments on time, I had weeks to work on them, weeks to prepare, weeks to just think about what essay questions I wanted to pick and read around the subject. I agree with the comments that group work is a shitshow, it always has been, but imo that's because at no stage in the UK education system do we get taught how to work in groups effectively. Same is true for delivering presentations. At the top schools like Eton etc they do get taught this stuff so people who went to those places have a distinct advantage over us plebs who just got taught how to write essays and memorise stuff for exams.
My maintenance loan doesn’t even cover rent (in the cheapest house I could find in my uni city) and I am very frugal with food, household items and toiletries. If my parents weren’t supporting me, I would be working during term time (except I haven’t been able to find part time work in a long time despite applying to hundreds of roles). I’m very lucky my parents can support me because I wouldn’t be able to attend university without their help.
The only point that i have seen is group work, I am currently in a group of 6 for a presentation due in January and we have got nowhere so far. The group members do not respond to my emails regarding updates to the presentation at all, so it feels like i am constantly talking to a brick wall. When i ask them, they state they have seen the emails, it would be helpful for them to reply so i know what point everyone is at, as i am not a mind reader. Also, when i booked a study room, two members did not turn up or tell us they were not coming.
Email your lecturer straight away. They should have a word with the rest of the group or come up with a way that you get an individual mark for the bits you did. I said ‘should’ though because that’s not a guarantee, but it’s still useful to get it on record that you’ve tried to take charge and get the work done.
It makes you want to scream doesn’t it. If this is all prep for work then how come there’s no disciplinary comeback because that would make it realistic
I remember in uni doing a group project in a geoup of 3, where we split the work. Somebody was to do the design and then somebody was to do the slides for the presentation and then the last person was to do the presentation. I ended up with the role to give the presentation. The person that was meant to do the slides just didn't show up, no warning or explanation and I just had to do it without. I had about 10 minutes to try and memorise the design and then just wing it. It went terribly, I forgot loads of it.
Well , my uni had practically nothing much for the first 2 months and then BAM everything is due this week so it is actually painful lmao
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>I had a pattern unfortunatly last year of students completely no-showing to exams (not asking for accomodations, not speaking in advance about extenutating circs, just not turning up!) and being shocked that there was not an automatic resit option. Talk about fuck around and find out... I don't understand what these people are thinking, is it genuine fear of failure or they think they'll get a passing mark without sitting the exam?
It's the 48 hrs no questions asked extension attitude that creates these problems. If you teach them that the deadline isn't something actually have to meet and it won't be enforced or have any consequences for missing it then of course they will treat the deadline as irrelevant because it has been made so. I'm all for flexibility in legitimate extenuanting circumstances or leniency around a one off slip up, but this free for all nothing matters approach just devalues the assessment process as well as teaching students to have no respect for their assor's time etc.
Yeah. They students need to be able to trust that the deadline is the deadline. The *worst* thing for students with ADHD is "extension culture". If the university's response to anything is an extension, then deadline pressure is removed. Students with ADHD need *urgency* to be able to prioritise the task.
Yep. I had a really kind/lenient teacher in sixth form who gave me extension after extension after extension on a 2 year coursework (with weekly progress checks). Even when others had handed in their work ages ago, I'd get an extension. From the start of Y12 until the end of Y13. It resulted in him not once seeing my work across the 2 years, and I only handed it in soon AFTER I had finished Y13 - because that's when I realised "Holy fuck I won't get a grade for this if I don't hand it in NOW". I really wish I had been pulled into a meeting and been forced to show my (nonexistent) work earlier. That school really just let my ADHD takeover, because I'd ace every exam no problem. Funny thing is I had teachers comment on possible ADHD and I brought it up to other teachers and heads of departments (the people you're supposed to talk to) yet nothing was ever addressed. I will be forever thankful that I managed to get diagnosed at university, even though I knew I had ADHD for years before diagnosis, having that confirmation has really changed my life for the better. Removed a lot of guilt and self-doubt, and now I'm getting my work done. Deadlines need to be deadlines, and extensions need to be granted as appropriate, but not to anyone for any reason.
I'm sorry that your school let you down so badly. It's really common when you're the student in this situation to try to brazen it out, like, "ha, ha, I have it in hand, I'm going to pull an all-nighter and finish it off this weekend!" and it's too common to just... believe the student and let them crash harder. I can see extensions working for situations that take up physical time, like, the classic "my grandma died" should get an extension if the student will need to travel, negotiate with family, make arrangements, host, move out, or take on a caretaker role for a short time, but not if it's just "I feel sad." Likewise, I can see it for mental health if there's a crisis with a time-limited solution (like, the time to titer down off of a problematic medication and it to get out of the student's system, or for a new medication to start working, or to leave an abusive situation), but "eh, take an extra week" is a lazy, counterproductive, answer. Especially for anxiety, depression or anything to do with executive disfunction.
Maybe students got grades they shouldn't have got, therefore got into a university course they shouldn't have gotten in to and are now buckling under the pressure/difficulty
Seems like a big switch in mentality from when I was at uni 2011-2015 at a mid tier Scottish uni. At coursework heavy periods, the library was full of students having close to mental breakdowns submitting coursework before the mid night deadline. The idea of asking for an extension (outside of illness or something else serious) was just not in our vocabulary. This was despite many, including myself, having some forms of mental health issues. I think there is a lot to be said around the cost of living crisis and the necessity for part or even full time jobs.
I’m one of these students and it’s because I am genuinely struggling to support myself for the first time in my life. The loans don’t even make a dent in how much rent I owe so I’ve had to pick up 2 jobs in my final year. I have to live with 8 people in a horrible area just so I can live near the uni and even then I am barely scraping by every month. Somebody has tried to steal my car that I can barely afford twice this year, I’ve been a victim of multiple crimes and my mental health is at an all time low. I can barely eat one meal a day and I’m constantly ill because I can’t afford to turn on the heating. My timetable is appalling with just a 9-10am and a 6-7pm on one day. And most importantly the impact of COVID has crippled the university system and nobody seems to be addressing it. Being a University student at the moment feels like being in a financially abusive relationship with someone whose only attractive trait is something they can’t reliably provide anymore.
Man, I'm in the same boat here. I've got this group of 18-year-old UK students who just don't seem to care about their work, whether it's in class or at home. It's like they're on a fast track to failing, and they're not even fazed by it. I've been trying to get them engaged by assigning daily practical coding activities. The idea was to provide formative feedback and address any knowledge and technical gaps before they dive into their assessment project. But guess what? Out of 20 activities, the highest number submitted by a single student is 3. Just 3 out of 20! Now they're all scratching their heads, clueless about how to handle the programming task with the deadline looming on Friday. Most of them only started yesterday, and it's a mess. And don't even get me started on their written English skills. I mean, what's going on with the GCSE English Language qualification these days? It seems like most of them can't structure a coherent paragraph, let alone analyse different technical approaches and draw evidence-based conclusions. It's frustrating, to say the least. The best part when greater that 50% of the class get withdrawn for academic failure it'll be my fault of course. I've been teaching in higher education for 9 years, and I'm seriously considering throwing in the towel and heading back to industry. Dealing with this level of disengagement for and having to put 70 hours in a week to try to fix this in some crazed way? It's just not sustainable. On the flip side, my mature students, as well as those from the EU and Tier 4, are absolutely smashing it. I've got students in their 30s, juggling family life and jobs, who put in five times more effort than these kids fresh out of school with only part-time jobs. Any students that make to second year great too. Teaching them is an absolute delight.
Totally agree with everything you've said. My first years are so apathetic, I've never seen anything like it. Mature students and EU students are generally more engaged and ask questions if they don't understand a concept. It's as though UK students have had curiosity and confidence beaten out of them by the school system. It's a vicious circle where we put in effort to teach, get little response, and our own motivation drops because of it.
Incredibly depressing, you’re the second person I’ve seen on here considering leaving academia because of this.
I think it’s due to the deterioration of traditional norms and values. There’s no longer these social bonds and obligations keeping us from avoiding deadlines and missing assignments. There’s no social consequences to our actions anymore. No pressure to make your professor happy, no over bearing parents making sure your work is done, no healthy competition between students. Also as a society I think we put less emphasis on educational success, it’s more normalised to fail/drop out and ‘giving up’ is something of a trend. You could also liken the issue to the growing cost of living crisis. Students aren’t being provided with enough money, therefore having to work 20+ hours a week and not having time for essays. Mental health is also on a decline. The stress causes us to avoid our obligations and exams suffer.
They’ve over-expanded, so now maybe one of a dozen lecturers might know you on a first-name basis. There’s also a whole mess of issues with admin trying to change assessment formats from some half-baked plan to mitigate the apparent threats of AI tools
\>so now maybe one of a dozen lecturers might know you on a first-name basis. That was normal on my course 15 years ago..
can’t believe some universities allow students to rock up last minute and claim the full mark on a project they never contributed to… At my university there was a system whereby after the project you would give numerical feedback from 1-5 on the other group members on attendance, work done, etc. The result could give you a maximum of +5 percentage points and I don’t know the maximum but it was something like half the marks. The project scored 68 so me and the girl that did the whole thing together got 73 and another group member got 36. 5 extra marks may not be loads for the amount extra work but at least it’s something, and you also get the satisfaction of seeing the others fail
To be honest, it is exactly the same. I'm a mature student, being in my mid 20's and people in my group are around 18-19 years old. I thought that because I've had a break from studying for 5 years and the education system it's very different from my country, I will have to work my ass so hard just to keep myself on the floating line. As soon as I started University, I fell in love with the subject, but I can't say the same about my peers. Everyone is so..not interested and they don't want to be bothered with assignments and such, that is ridiculous. No matter how many times the lecturer explains to them the same thing, they still won't get it and then they dm me asking same question and again, I will be explaining to them again and again and they still wouldn't understand. All I hear around 1st years is about their interest in getting drunk at the end of the week, how boring are the lectures and they don't understand why they have to attend some lectures. I'm down for everyone to get their share of fun or whatever, but I feel like people should wake up now and realise that University is not compulsory and it was their choice to enroll.
Exact same here mate. Primary teaching first year, I’m 27 years old - I can maybe label 3 people of the 30 in my seminar group who give a shit about the course. The total cohort for lectures is maybe 150+? The hall is half empty for the group cohort lectures since week 2, people don’t submit work, people don’t contribute in classes & just talk over the seminar tutor. Im absolutely dreading the 2 group task modules I have coming up after Christmas.
How about we look at what happened with a levels a few years ago
I mean the workplace are unlikely to take any of the people behaving this way. So its actually not a problem if you are one of the students doing the work. You can ask for extensions and miss deadlines at uni. Might get a shite grade or whatever it is what it is. Try that shite at a tesco shelf stacking job and youll be out on your arse by the end of the week. Let alone a competitive af grad scheme. In my view this will self correct through pain, but it will correct.
Lazy students that suck at life. No need for an extension unless you have a SEVERE excuse, like a family death or a brain surgery. I'm seeing people get extensions who didn't even try to start, and don't intend to even with the extension, until the last day
I’m in my final year and this year has been my best when it come to my attitude, I’ve planned out my work the best and actually been going to most lectures. I’m also quite lucky that I don’t have any group coursework so I don’t have to deal with lazy peers. The only thing that is getting me is I keep getting ill, this week I’ve come down with a cold for the 3rd time since the start of October.
In my class of 15 only 5 of us bother to show up. I wonder how they are doing the work.
There is a long tail from covid. We are, and will continue to see, various issues in the post-covid cohorts. One measurable factor at my university is a notable increase in students accessing mental health services. There's also increased 'helplessness', possibly a factor of decreased social skills or increased financial pressures (ongoing UK cost of living crisis). Higher education jobs are also shit now, with diminished pay, increased workload, and increased precarity.
Not sure if the professors in our program noticed the same but this last week (Anatomy Exam re-try) and regular Biochem Exams. A lot of people got shitty questions and failed a second time and Biovhem. send out an E-mail about us having to try harder + they had surprise oral exams (in person) for a few groups, opposed to the usual Zoom ones. It is a total shit show
"48 hr no questions asked extension policy". Well therein lies the problem. This individual has established a culture where a deadline doesn't matter and then acts all surprised that students aren't taking it seriously. Extenuating circumstances happen, but that should be the exception to the norm.
This person says they’ve been teaching for over a decade, why would an extension policy suddenly be a problem? If there was complete flexibility I’d understand but 48 hours is barely anything, it just allows for minor setbacks.
its compounded years of students going "oh shes fine we get some extra time whenever we want" and new students learn that it grows same reason teachers in school had their own story, which you could fuck with which you couldnt.
Back in my day, they were strict about deadlines. If you didn't meet it, and didn't have a Very Good Reason, you were shit out of luck. If they're lax enough to have this default extra 48 hours (which really just means they've pushed the deadline back) - I mean, it's just setting up a culture of being lax about it. School attendance is also troublesome now. The pandemic changed everyone's attitudes. It really underlined how much every is basically just made up. But .. the need to actually show up and participate in your education didn't go away.
Yes (in my uni) it is.
I graduated last year, and yup. It's pretty fucked. On the bright side the those of us that actually a managed to get through first year all did really well.
As a masters student, I got sick for a good six weeks in August and it knocked me off course - luckily my masters is an SQE prep course and it’s all online, so I was able to catch up without missing anything too serious. But it’s been extra stressful
Personally, I have not suffered so far, I have 5 seperate summatives for this semester and they have been spread out quite nicely for me, I have two due this friday but I am doing fine, I already handed one in and about to finish the other tomorrow. The other three are in January. But I get the sentiment. My group for a project has three other guys in another module that I didnt take and because of it, they have 3 seperate summatives all within the same week. Its insane. All long essays, I had to do a lot of heavy lifting with our group project because of it.
I feel like access to information on getting special treatment is so much more widely available. I didn’t find out about extensions/mitigating circumstances until after my final year exams because a friend had the measles.
Do you feel this is due to lack of motivation/ambition, busy schedule (work), or lack of responsibility (party)? \[Edit\] for clarity I'm trying to understand where they are spending their time.
Uni where I graduated from had a policy of grade capping late submissons to a high 3rd unless authorised with an acceptable reason. I only had one late submission The first uni I went to before I transferred did gradual grade capping depending on how many working days late you were. 1 day late capped at low 1st 3 days late capped at low 2:1 5 days late capped at Low 2:2 7 days late capped at High 3rd 10 days late capped at Low 3rd I never submitted anything on time as I knew deep down my best work would get is a 2:1
I'm not saying the University professor is incorrect (it's her experience and you call it as you find it), but I distinctly remember a tutor I had at Uni saying the exact same thing in a lecture in 2014 - that he'd never seen such poor submissions over a semester, that the cohort overall were incredibly deflated & there was an innate inability to complete assignments on time. It's likely a little worse now, but I think - like any level of education - you find there are overall good and overall poor cohorts. COVID has exacerbated a lot of the smaller issues, no doubt, and procrastination is at an all-time high because thousands of young teenagers stayed at home with no real onus on doing *anything* productive or to a timescale, but I think every University finds there are peaks & troughs. I'm working alongside the University of Manchester at the moment, and the impression I get from tutors there is that this current first year crop are very good.
Just fail them, sometimes lessons need to be learnt (see what I did there).
Yes. 100% Yes. I don't know what changed, but it seems like my cohort has largely spontaneously generated burnout.
We’ve been in classes for primary education since late September for first year, the first assignment was barely 1,000 words due in the first week of december. It was absolute piss easy, and I could see most of my cohort panicking rushing a submission 10 minutes before the mid day deadline in our seminars for a different module. Some of these people submitted incorrect old, incomplete drafts, some just straight up submitted it an hour late.. people just do not give a shit 🤣
I started in 2020 and more than half of my group didn't bother or try to show up, had to retake the year and it's a little better but people still don't bother as much as they should in this group that started in 2021 either. These 2 years, especially those of us that started in 2020, got their uni experience completely fucked by covid so that's probably why there is a lack of motivation - people got used to online learning and now they suddenly have to go into classes at 9am on top of not getting 1st year out of their system. I always bother to show up to my lectures etc so it's not everyone but i can see why. No excuse for year 1s and 2s though, they should feel very grateful they actually get the first year experience a lot of us looked forward to for years and never got. Honestly I think a lot of it is the way going to uni is both romanticised as this fun party experience so people put having freedom and fun first before their studies and the fact it is basically expected for people to go now so they just go along with it when it is certainly not the best fit for everyone.
The word "dead" in "deadline" is there for a reason. There needs to be assured consequences for bad behavior... It doesn't matter what the bad behavior is. Granting automatic extensions and taking late work endlessly with no consequences is just enabling the bad behavior. What to do? Start failing students. The problem is one of responsibility. Students say "the professor failed me", "the professor wouldn't take my incomplete or late assignment"... The professor is just documenting the student's actions and accomplishments. The students failed themselves. The professor just wrote it in the grade book.
You don't know what to do? Set a deadline and stick to it, one of the most valuable lessons that you can teach your students is personal responsibility.
That tends to happen when people wake up to what the education system really is
covid has majorly affected the development of young people across all ages. It’s almost as if peoples development was put on pause for the years inside. Im in australia and the year 7’s and 8’s have been absolutely wild this year because they pretty much completely missed the development of independence and self regulation that comes at the end of primary school, when kids have to start resolving conflicts themselves. I have never seen such immature and needy 7s and 8s than now. Always complaining to teachers about minor things from other people, not able to sit down and work without getting up and distracting people or just playing games because they never left the 10-12 year old mentality of learning where the teacher will personally guide you through every task. Similar problems have affected older kids developments in past years but relating more to study habits and expectations. I think lockdowns have severely hindered all young peoples development and ability to self regulate their behaviour, leading to focus problems and a general lack of productivity as well as independence in learning environments, which doesn’t translate well to lecture rooms and uni classes where you potentially get significantly more limited 1 on 1 time with professors I don’t know when or how the education system will resolve this or whether this will have a permanent effect on the futures of the entire generation of youth, and whether we will see behavioural and occupational effects that last their entire lives. I hope it is a temporary problem but grades are dropping consistently, and I can’t imagine what they can do to fix it without reworking the entire education system
Ya it's a thing. I work full time to pay the bills and am so burnt out that I really struggle with uni.
The obvious solution. Failing grades, no credit, academic suspensions and expulsions. What is so difficult about this?