In a Statistics related class, Whenever I do a group project, my group members don't know how to do anything as much as I do, and if it's a big group such a 5 person group, one person may help me write. The other person doesn't have any original ideas and will do some small tasks I tell them to do, and the rest don't know how to program.
I end up doing most of the work because I don't want to receive a bad grade, and I put everything in the project report. The professor doesn't really care about a fair division of labor, and on the day before presentations everyone ends up reading my project report, and especially the two people who did nothing just memorize what I said, then since the professor says everyone has to speak during the presentation, they end up stealing my lines, and I end up divide my work and sharing credit for it and throw it to charity.
How do I mitigate my group members plagiarizing off me and taking advantage of me? This doesn't happen when I work with people who actually understand what they're doing in class, and it's not a big deal when a project isn't worth 40 percent of the grade.
The only benefit is that I know how to code everything, and they don't but the professor doesn't check who coded what or care. They don't seem to care or they don't know how to code and can't help themselves help me.
The problem is in an introductory freshman graduate course, I don't know who's capable of doing good work, and I can only seek the "smart" people as I gain knowledge of who's capable and not capable.
The professor is clueless and expects that everyone is capable of either coding well or having original Innovative ideas. But that isn't true. Some people neither are original nor code well. He expects us to play nice with each other.
Since I end up doing all the work, by presentation day, I'm also too exhausted to present well, and I can't shake things up, and I thought about quitting the group and doing things on my own, but should I do that? The people in my group are close and might conspire against me.
Option one: send the professor an e-mail privately telling him I did everything but per his instructions we have to split up the presentation and everyone pretends they did a fair amount.