I went to a conservative Christian college. As such, one of my classes was on Biblical archeology. One week, we were assigned to do papers on ancient Egypt. I always looked for creative ways to do things, so I wrote mine in Hieroglyphics. 

I got a B.

We were told to spend a minimum of four hours on the project; my teacher asked me how long I took. It took three and a half hours.

At least I learned how to do profiles of owls, eyes, and waving bundles of grain.

This takes place during what is supposed to be my last semester of college. I’m majoring in finance, and all business majors are required to take a capstone course before graduation. In this class, we basically do nothing but group work, and we are stuck with the same group for the entire semester.

I wind up in a group that has a marketing major, an international business major, and an independent studies major; she made her own major using business classes and classes from another degree program but still had to take the capstone class. The two girls in my group are who I mostly talk about because the one guy in the group does seem to sympathize with me but never does anything about how the girls are treating me.

The first few assignments aren’t that big, and we make it through all right. Then, we get to the first big project. The assignment is to take a well-known tech company and find a way to improve it. The first step is to look at the financials for this company as well as three competitors. Since I’m the finance major, we decide that I should do the financials for the tech company while each of my teammates does the financials for one of the competitors.

To properly do the financials, you must first go the SEC website, find the 10-K doc for your company, and copy the Balance Sheet, the Income Statement, and the Cash Flows statement into an Excel doc. My accounting professors all drilled into me that part of this process includes finding all the totals on these statements ourselves and not just copy/pasting them into Excel. Once you have these statements in Excel, you must then calculate about thirty different ratios using the data you pulled from the SEC site. Most of the ratios are straight-forward, but the last two or three give me some trouble. All in all, this whole process takes me about two hours to complete.

The day this assignment is due, we meet an hour before class starts to compile everything together and so I can look over their ratios. I quickly notice something is off with all of their documents. Instead of manually calculating all the ratios, they just Googled the current ratios for their company. “It’ll be fine; just check and make sure the ratios are fine,” they tell me.

“I can’t check them; there’s no math for me to check!” I explain.

“Then do the math,” they say.

Yes, they want me to do about six hours’ worth of work in forty-five minutes. I instead compare their numbers to mine, fix anything that looks really wrong to me, and let it be. They are livid when our professor gives us back a poor grade, saying 90% of our ratios were wrong and we didn’t show the math most of the time. Turns out, all but two of my ratios were correct.

Things get worse for me a few weeks later. The class meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have a small assignment I think is due on a Thursday but is really due on a Tuesday. I find out an hour before class that I have my dates wrong. Luckily, I have the assignment half-done, so I quickly finish it up so I have something to turn in. My teammates do not like that, and this is the point when two of them decide I am a bad group mate.

I am taking a full course load that semester, and my teammates don’t like that I insist on going to my other classes, specifically my English class. I have put off taking my last 200-level English class, and the school actually has an attendance policy for 100- and 200-level classes. I am only allowed three unexcused absences a semester, and we use a clicker system to take attendance.

“We all skip our other classes to get this done, you should, too,” they reason. They even purposefully schedule meetings with our professor during my English class so they can make a case that I am not doing anything to help with the project.

As the time for our big presentation grows closer, we spend most of our spare time in the library. This is when I learn that I am the only stress-eater in a group of stress-starvers. If I insist on taking a thirty-minute meal break, they throw a fit. If I bring snacks, they say I am too distracting. If I bring headphones so I can listen to some soft music while I work, they say I need to contribute more to the group. When I say I need to leave by eleven so I can actually get some sleep, they whine and say I need to stay and help with the work. When I say I need to study for a quiz for another class, they say this is the only class that matters. There is no pleasing these people, so I stop trying.

In our presentation, we’re supposed to use an Adobe product — not PowerPoint — for our slides. Now, one of my other classes is also doing group presentations with this same program, so I am the only one on my team who is familiar with the program. As such, I volunteer to handle the slides. My groupmates aren’t quite ready when I ask for their parts, so I change my password on the site to something generic — I’m already using my college email address — and give them the login info so they can update the presentation on their own time. The night before the presentation, I check the slides, make a few adjustments, and go to bed.

The next day, I’m pulling up the slides on my laptop and to my horror, one of the girls has gone in and totally changed everything. There isn’t time to fix it, unfortunately. No surprise, we get a bad grade on the presentation. But when they have the gall to say I was the one in charge of the slides and making sure everything looked nice, I am furious. I go to our professor after the fact and tell him I cannot work with them any longer. He won’t put me in another group, but he does say I can do the work by myself.

I ended up dropping the class. I signed up to take my capstone class online that summer and begged the school to still let me walk at graduation. They said I could. Unfortunately, my grades in my other classes suffered that semester, and I only passed two of my classes. I did walk at graduation, but I had to retake most of my classes online that fall.

After I dropped the class, I was over at a friend’s dorm. Her dorm was more like a suite with one common area and three bedrooms with two or three beds in each room. Turns out, one of my groupmates was one of my friend’s suitemates, and my friend said she was a horrible suitemate. 

By far, this was the worst group project I ever had.

In 2014, I was a mature student in my final year of a part-time Computer Science degree. The final year involved a software development project which ran over two semesters and all students were allocated an individual Project Supervisor, who helped us develop the project and gather requirements, etc. We also had a Project Coordinator, who we were timetabled with once per week, and who was supposed to guide us through managing the project and writing our dissertation.

During the penultimate week of the autumn semester, our Project Coordinator was going to great lengths to prepare us for our first milestone, a presentation showcasing our project and the work we had done to date. She repeatedly emphasised that we must not fail the presentation part of the module; otherwise, we’d fail the whole course.

I suspect this was an embellishment on her part, but still.

We were supposed to upload a copy of our presentation to the Online Learning Environment used by the University no later than the night before the presentation, and then we’d do the presentation during class time the following evening.

That week, I finished off my presentation, and on Sunday evening, I sat down and uploaded it to the Online Learning Environment — OLE. The way the OLE worked, when you uploaded something, you’d get a green icon on the screen with a message that said, “Your document, [Title], has been uploaded,” but for some reason, you wouldn’t get an email confirmation.

I uploaded my document and got the green icon as I usually did, so I closed my browser window and went off to do something else. On Monday night, I did my presentation, which the assessors all said was excellent. They even scored me quite highly in it — above 70% — which I was pleased about.

On Tuesday evening, I got an email from the Project Coordinator. She informed me that she had discovered I “hadn’t uploaded” my presentation, and therefore, she was going to fail me. She informed me that “she had told us several times” not to fail the presentation, and that because uploading the presentation was a mandatory requirement, she was therefore authorised to fail me.

I replied to her email and said that, a,  I had been to class on Monday night, b, I had done my presentation, and, c, I had been given a very good mark for it.

She was uninterested. She kept insisting that “she had to follow procedure” and that she now had to fail me.

I was furious. I told my wife, who was also furious. In tears, I phoned my project supervisor, who was horrified. He said he had never, in all his years supervising projects, heard of anything so petty and ridiculous. He emailed the Head Of School and copied me in. The HOS was as shocked as he was, and said that, in his opinion, if I had done the presentation and been given a mark, there should be no reason to fail me.

His advice? To submit an Extenuating Circumstance claim, which would be reviewed during the Christmas holidays.

I did so, and emailed my Project Coordinator to inform her that this is what I would be doing. Her response was frosty: “Do what you like. I have to follow procedure.”

I submitted my EC claim and went abroad with my wife to stay with her family over Christmas. While away, I got an email from the School of Computing to inform me that “The EC committee had reviewed my claim and determined that I was not at fault and should be awarded the mark for my presentation.”

Relieved, I came back off Christmas break and threw myself into my project again, with one slight difference: from now on, any time I submitted assessed work to the Online Learning Environment, I screenshotted the confirmation message and emailed it to both the Project Coordinator and my Project Supervisor.

I completed my project, graduated, and later went on to complete a PhD! The Project Coordinator never said anything else about her intention to fail me. I’m not sure why she took such a notion, and I doubt I’ll ever find out, nor will I ever find out why my presentation didn’t upload.

The one time I don’t turn in my work for my senior English class, I have a legitimate excuse. 

Teacher: “Where’s your homework?”

Me: “My cat dragged it into the other room, and…”

I don’t know how to say that she peed on it. 

Teacher: “Half points! Best excuse I’ve ever heard!”

I am a math teacher at an elementary school. In the late 1980s, I had this one fourth-grader who was very brilliant but sometimes took directions a little too literally. One day, I had the class do a special math problem together after the lesson, where they not only had to show their work as usual but also provide a written explanation on the back of the worksheet detailing the purpose of each step taken to solve the problem.

While the class was working, I noticed that the brilliant kid took a little longer to solve the problem than usual. When he turned it in at the end of class, I saw why.

He had written an overly-detailed explanation explaining literally everything he had done. It was so long and detailed that he actually took up not only the whole backside of the worksheet — most students needed only little more than half — but also about a dozen lines on a sheet of notebook paper.

I laughed to myself and gave him a four — the highest score possible — because he had solved the problem correctly and, while very long, his explanation was ”technically” correct. I told him that the next time I gave him a similar problem, he only needed to explain the solution the same way that his math book explained how to solve example problems.

It’s been over thirty years, and he has since graduated from a nearby Ivy League college and gotten a career in statistics. His son now attends my school and will be in my class for the 2020-21 school year.