Not pulling her weight

[AnUnhappyStudent]

I am a mature student at uni. We have to do a group presentation tomorrow and have been meeting as a group for the last couple of months to work on it. One of the group has really taken the piss.
Turned up to about a third of the meetings, not delivered on her stuff, not letting us know when she is not attending meetings but then turning up to the one session we had with tutor
I raised it with the group and it was agreed that we would mail her and say if she didn't get her finger out we were going to ask for her to be removed as she will be graded on something she hasn't contribute to.

Today we are meeting up for a run through and its been arranged weeks. Just had an email from her to say that her uncle is seriously ill and she will need to leave early! I don't believe it for a minute. We have had various stories of ill relatives and just serms like its another excuse. But I could be wrong.
Anyway we have to submit a record of how we worked as a group this can involve meeting notes, action logs and emails. If I include the email we sent her then it will be really obvious that she was not a team player but would it reflect badly on me for dobbing her in as it were?? And what if uncle is really ill? I would feel awful

Boney I think you're a teacher it's a hard job inspiring young minds but someone's got to do it.

HorridHenryrule

Not the OP
and I am a teacher. one that mentors NQTs.
Although I have experienced the same in other professional fields as well.

She's taking the piss. This happened all through my sister's uni course. Some people are just lazy buggers happy to ride on other people's coat tails. Submit an accurate record, and let them deal with any fallout.

When I was a Uni a few years ago one of the other groups threw out a member of the group and refused to allow his name on the assignment. Instead of producing the 25-30 page group essay this guy decided he could blow off the group, took a fulltime job and didn't attend any meetings or produce any work.

One of the tutors tried to persuade the group to be "kind" and include him on the assignment but they refused as they felt he had taken the piss.

The tutors decided that instead of participating in a 4 week fulltime project he could instead do a make-up assignment of 3 pages. So not a bad deal for the guy - 3 pages that he could do in a day or so plus a month of fulltime pay.

Oh and it was a teacher training course!

Interesting thread.
I'm in the final few weeks of my masters and I'm in a similar situation to the OP. We're in a group, half of us are doing the work, the other half have a whole myriad of excuses for doing nothing.
So off the back of this thread I'm actually going to raise this with my tutor mainly because the posters I generally find myself agreeing with on most threads are the ones saying that it's unfair and unnecessary.

My last year uni group consisted of my self one other and several non-participants. We should have kept meeting records but it all seemed informal. In the end, I was the only one to submit a design and protype with essay. At one project submission, someone asked if he could look at my project results. They then ran off with them saying they were going to photocopy them. The rest of us then submitted our results and the other person submitted the photocopies! The tutor asked if I collaborated. I explained what happened but my work was marked down.
Do not let slackers get away with it. Do not let others see your own work until after you submit it. Allocate work according to ability and capability.

I passed my courses. I became an acting Director General (ministerial head).

Good researching.

TBH when I was at Uni this would have been flagged far earlier than the presentation date. Does your Uni not have a system for flagging this with your course tutor? Or a way of recording issues to be taken into consideration when marking?

My tutors always used to ask us to report any issues earlier rather than later because if you reported early they could put solutions in place but if you left it till the day of presentations or only mentioned it afterwards it came across as trying to make excuses.

One of our tutors used to tell us if we were having issues with a group member, we needed to document everything, so we always had a record of the "minutes" of every meeting - including who was there and who was absent/the work done/what we had to do for next time etc. They would get written up by one person and emailed to the group so that we all had a copy and anyone who was missing from the meeting could see what we had done.

We also used google docs to collate all the info/work we had done and it had to be there before the meeting started, so if anyone's work was missing we could note it in the meeting minutes. eg "John Smith - absent, illness. Section B Part 1 - John Smith was working on them this week but hasn't uploaded to google doc so we can't work on Part 2 until that has been uploaded. Sophie Jackson will message to chase info for next week's meeting and will work on Section C Part 3 this week instead."

That way if our presentation has a very weak section, there is a paper trail to show that John Smith was in charge of that section and despite repeated requests for the work he did bare minimum, didn't turn up to half the meetings and didn't acknowledge messages left by other group members.

Also, if it was at the point where one member was doing absolutely nothing then the tutor asked to be informed so that they could speak to the student and, if necessary request to be CC:ed into any group correspondence so they can see just how little work was being done.