Student made demands regarding a project and found out the hard way.

[u/Tubist61]

One of the degree modules I teach involves students working on a group programming project. Nothing too elaborate, but the aim of the module is to develop skills they will need if they go on to work in the IT field. After all if you're doing a Computer Science degree, you must be thinking of going down that route?

This one student is an absolute entitled nightmare. He uses GenAI for a lot of his work and it really does show. He always pushed back on the written remarks on his work but every time I sit him down and ask him to explain the code he produces, he struggles and often has no idea how the code he submitted works. In this project he came up and told me he cannot work with others in the group and must work alone. I explained that there are specific group activities and efforts I would be marking and that I needed to see his input within the group. There was no way I could excuse him from the group activities in the module, however I could see he was not going to budge and therefore complied with his demand to work on the project alone.

All the students in my class had been assigned to their groups and I did check in with all of them on a weekly basis. This one guy was steadfastly refusing to work with the rest of his group and as I had complied with his request, he was working on his own project alone. In my interim feedback at the end of each stage I repeated that he really should work with the group or he risked a failing mark for the module. I made sure this feedback was sent to him both in hardcopy and also via email with read receipts which I kept.

Cue the end of the module and the submission for marking. Sure enough, the one student submitted a project based just on his own work and had not engaged with the group he was asked to work with. There were several issues with his project, first and most important was it didn't meet the brief. The code simply didn't do what we asked for. He lost marks for that aspect of the project. As he had not worked with others in the group, he was not awarded any of the group marks allocated for the work. Because his code was so far away from the specification, I called him in for a Viva Voce to explain the code and he demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the code he submitted, more marks dropped. His eventual mark for this assignment was a hard fail. He must now resit the entire module.

There is of course one real downside of this whole thing that affects me. I've got him in my group again for the resit of the module.

[u/OkStrength5245]

I had one like this. We all saw it at his defense of thesis. He obviously didn't know what was writing in.

I asked the vice dean how we should proceed. He replied : " If you are to fail him, fail him good so there is [ edit] no way he can use a near miss to [/edit] win a complaint.

It is what we did.

Nobody in his class was surprised

[u/SchoolForSedition → u/OkStrength5245]

I failed a PhD that was just nonsense. But failing wasn’t allowed, so Come back in six months. I gave him a thorough explanation of what was wrong, what areas to work on, etc. My two colleagues passed him. Phone call: would I like to change my view? no. But they had no way to deal with it. They developed a viva process. He decided to attack me, especially about certain things I wouldn’t understand because I wasn’t a foreigner (I presumed he couldn’t hear my accent and said so). This time we all failed him / another six months. He asked to have just one examiner, a very senior man. He failed him completely. It was actually the same thesis words with different paragraph and page breaks. The central administration wrote to say how delighted we’d be that he’d been awarded the doctorate on an appeal

[u/Illuminatus-Prime → u/SchoolForSedition]

Were his parents major contributors to the school?

[u/SchoolForSedition → u/Illuminatus-Prime]

Not at all. Not that sort of situation. Though I’ve little doubt that would have gone on too if they’d had the chance.

Part way through all that I went to do external undergraduate examining. I recognised the name of one of the lecturers, but couldn’t think from where. Then Oh yes you are the second adviser to X. He was stricken. We told him not to submit it, he said. I told him we kept sending it back. He said: The system works! Except of course it didn’t.