I Despise Group Work

We have to do ridiculous skits for French class. They're required for every semester (though hopefully in France they'll make us go talk to people instead). It counts as an oral exam grade, but since we have so many grades in the class (2 tests, a final, 2 oral exams, 5 homeworks, quizzes every week), it's 7.5% of the total grade. Not a lot, but enough to where it has to be done. In the past two semesters, they've gone pretty well. I had pretty responsible people in my group. Still, we probably invested 6-8 hours in writing, filming, and editing it. That's a lot of time investment for such a small part of the grade. The final is worth almost three times as much and I won't study for even half of that time.

This semester, I thought the skit was going to be much easier. I got in what I thought would be a good group. We have 3 people, instead of the usual 4, which means we only need 4.5 minutes of speaking instead of 6 (90 seconds of speaking per person). One of the guys sits in the front and always participates in class, and the other seemed studious enough. Sounds good, right? Last weekend I met up with the participating guy (PG) to start writing the lines. The other guy couldn't make it, but that didn't bother me because we had given only a day's notice and not consulted him on the time. I worked with PG for about an hour to write 4 scenes, each one with about 8-10 lines. That's it. And he said that was enough and any more would go over our time. We read through it very slowly and it came up around 2:35 when we need at least 3. Which I know from past experience won't be nearly enough once we film it. But he didn't want to work on it anymore. He's made a habit of saying how busy he is and how he doesn't need the course. And then he dropped the course, but he's still going because he wants to learn French - he just doesn't have time to do well in it. But he still says he's going to do the skit.

Other guy hasn't shown up to class all week. We decide to meet today during our normal class time in the classroom as we have the day off to work on the skits. PG said he'd get in touch with the other guy as they're friends on Facebook. I go to class today, my only one, and I'm the only one there. Fantastic. I emailed other guy and told him to let me know by the end of today if he still wanted to be in the group, and he replied shortly after saying that PG hadn't told him we were meeting. Great. Guess you should've gone to class then, eh? You would've made the meeting had you just gone to the class during our normal class time. Brilliant.

He can't work on it this weekend either, so it won't be until Monday, I can't do it Tuesday, and it's due Wednesday. Greeeeat.