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Group projects are hard enough without professors making them even harder.

One college student student had a statistics professor who insisted that every group member complete exactly the same amount of work.

However, their group had a problem with one of the members. He stopped showing up and ignored all of their messages.

When they asked the professor for help, he told them to figure it out themselves. So, they started documenting every part of the project, and discovered that three of them had each contributed 33%.

But when they told the fourth member their findings, he also claimed to have completed 33% of the work.

Read on to see what happened when they told the professor.

The 132% Group Project

My junior year statistics professor was obsessed with equal participation in group projects.

His rule: “If I determine anyone did more or less work than their teammates, the entire group gets a zero.”

His verification method? Each member submitted a confidential report detailing exactly what percentage of the total work they personally completed. If the reports didn’t match up perfectly, we failed.

Only three of the four group members really did any work.

My group of four included myself, two diligent students, and “Chad,” who never showed up to meetings or responded to messages. When we approached the professor two weeks before the deadline about Chad’s lack of participation, he repeated his policy and told us to figure it out ourselves.

That’s when we had an idea. We created a spreadsheet with over 200 individual tasks, documenting everything from “emailing the professor” to “proofreading page 3” to “thinking about the project while commuting.”

We logged who did each task and exactly how many minutes it took.

Apparently, the fourth member did all of his work “behind the scenes.”

The day before the project was due, we sent Chad our breakdown showing the three of us had each completed approximately 33% of the work, leaving him with exactly 0%.

Chad responded, “Actually, I’ve been working behind the scenes on my own. I’ve completed exactly 33% of the work independently.”

The next day in class, each of us submitted our confidential report. The three of us reported 33% each, while Chad also claimed 33%.

The professor was confused. “That adds up to 132%,” he said. “How is that possible?”

Fortunately for them, the professor only had one option.

I spoke up: “Professor, you never specified that the work couldn’t overlap. You only said we each had to do equal work. We have documented evidence that each of us completed 33% of the total project requirements.”

The professor was furious but couldn’t argue with his own rules. He had to give our group an A, though he did add a new rule the next semester: “Work completed by group members must be unique and not duplicated by other members.”

Chad never showed us his “independent work,” but we learned that when professors create arbitrary rules without thinking through the implications, sometimes the best response is to follow those rules to their ridiculous logical conclusion.

Wow! That worked out well for them!

Let’s check out how the people over at Reddit feel about it.

This is so true!

According to this professor, the policy makes no sense.

Technically, college isn’t the “real world.”

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who gets revenge on her neighbors after they keep using her trash bins.

Here’s another professor who agrees that it’s a bad rule.

This is exactly why group projects can be such a pain.

The fact is that no matter how you split it, group work is never going to be completely fair.

In this situation, the students told him one person wasn’t helping at all, and instead of stepping in, he basically made it their problem.

Let’s hope next time he steps in and gives his students a solution.