9 Team Effort

April 22, 2007

On April 19, 2006, Virginia e-mailed me:
Listen I am very upset here! You cannot give me a low grade because I have a work partner. If I choose to team up with one of the other students in my class to do my assignments with, that should be fine. I will be bringing this to the attention of the school Dean and Academic Services. Any one student shall not be confined to limited studies, if I work better with the help of a student and vice versa this should not be a problem. Besides these are question that are direct and come from the power point slides and internet, so of course the answers will be the same. Now, for the other assignments like the collages and personal projects like trading cards this is something that can only be
done by one student.

ps. I also spoke with my supervisor who will be contacting you regarding this matter.

I wrote to my supervisor:

As in all my classes, I emphasize individual responsiblity for one's work although occasional group and team efforts are encouraged as part of small group activities.

The problem is if we have study partners who hand in identical work, how can we judge the proficiency of either or whether or both are doing the work. The assignments ask for personal opinions in 2 or 3 questions -- not one person asking as the spokesman for the group.

Virginia did not follow directions for term project A which is a personal collage about herself. The assignment asked for ten pictures and a sentence or caption each expressing your opinion on the various political issues. You simply submitted some family photographs without any captions at all. .

Virginia did not follow directions on the second major project for which I wrote:
Do not confuse the personal/political collage with trading cards. Please resubmit by following instructions.
Due date: March 7, 2007

Instructions: Trading Cards Project (equal to a test)
You will be asked to create 5 trading cards of five Americans active in the political arena since 1900. Virginia sent in assignment # 2 as fulfilling assignment #b which was irrelevant to the assingment in question.

It appears that Virginia is the weaker of two students. Lucille and Virginia. It would have been nice know from the beginning that they were working together as “study partners “if all were above board. However, we are entering a nebulous area and we should set guidelines in the future to cover this.Since neither Lucille and Virginia have ever participated in discussion questions (and there have been twelve of them), this seems to show an inability to really analyze material or think for oneself.