I actually miss my former classmates from the MBA program

They had their faults, but at least they were a lot more proactive about group projects than these undergraduates in my business writing class.

Comments

[Laurel]

Which is worse: Proactively plagiaristic, or not proactive at all?

[Jacqueline]

Hey at least when they send me their plagiarized stuff promptly they're allowing me sufficient time to detect and deal with it! In some ways that's actually better than waiting until the last minute to do... nothing.

There are three people in my group.

One person is awesome. He sent perfect notes. Exactly what I had in mind.

Wikipedia-boy needed a little re-explaining of expectations but he came through in the end.

My third group member, though, is MIA.

To begin with, she has not submitted any notes yet even though everyone else has and we were *all* running behind our originally agreed-to schedule.

Then, when I called her this afternoon to inquire, she claimed that she had prepared notes but was unable to email them to me because she had a Mac. She claimed that she wouldn't be able to send her file until she was on campus next. I suggested if she was having problems with file formats that she just copy/paste the text. She seemed a bit flabbergasted by that suggestion.

Then later, when I found out that I needed to include detailed reports of what each group member has been working on in our progress report that was due tonight, I called her back to ask her to at least tell me about her sources and general topics so I could write that she did something. She didn't answer my call. Then she texted me that she was at work and couldn't answer. (Two weeks ago she told me that this class was the only thing she was doing this summer and that she didn't work or have any other classes.) I texted her back that I needed to talk to her to get information for the progress report that was due tonight and worth 10% of our final class grade. She texted me back that she would call me when she got off work at 9pm.

9pm came and went. No call. I texted her a couple of times. No call or return texts. I tried calling her again. No answer.

Oh well. She's the one who's going to look bad for obviously not submitting anything before the progress report. I was as euphemistic as possible about it "[Redacted] has been researching information from articles" and resisted the urge to add the word "supposedly". But everyone else has 3-4 line paragraphs describing their work so I think the instructor will figure it out. I don't know what else I could do, though.

Maybe she really has notes, and really has computer problems, and something bad or weird happened to her or her phone tonight. But I think it's more likely that she just flaked and is avoiding me.

[Shawn Levasseur]

"she had prepared notes but was unable to email them to me because she had a Mac"

I'm a Mac user, and I'm calling B.S. on that one. Most word processing programs on Windows, Macs, and even Linux save to Word format, RTF format, or some other commonly used cross-platform format (or, god forbid, plain text!).