When your group partner disappears.

Protect yourself in week one, not week five

The single most effective habit costs nothing: do your own portion early and put it in the shared document, under your name, where the instructor can see it.

That does two things at once. It creates a visible, timestamped record of what you contributed, which settles any later question about who did what. And it means that if the group collapses near the deadline, you are absorbing somebody else's share with your own work already finished, rather than starting everything at midnight.

• ✦Agree who does what in writing, in the shared space, in week one
• ✦Put your own section in early with your name on it
• ✦Keep group communication in the platform where it is visible, not private messages
• ✦Set an internal deadline several days before the real one
• ✦Save your own copy of everything you contributed, separately

The message that usually restarts a group

Before escalating, try one specific message. Vague chasing produces vague silence; the version that works is short, names the person, names the piece, and gives a date.

It also gives them an easy way to say they are struggling. A surprising proportion of silent group members are not indifferent but overwhelmed, embarrassed, or dealing with something they have not told anyone. A message offering a smaller task and an easy out frequently recovers a whole contribution that pressure would not have.

When and how to tell the instructor

Tell them before the deadline, not after. A message afterwards asking for your grade to be adjusted is a complaint; a message beforehand describing the situation is information they can act on while it still matters.

Keep it factual and unemotional. Who was assigned what, what has been delivered, what you have contributed, what you have done to reach the missing person, and what you are proposing to do about the deliverable. Instructors deal with this every term and respond well to a student who is documenting rather than accusing. Many will intervene directly, and some will adjust individual grading where contribution is clearly evidenced.

Decide what you will actually submit

At some point you have to choose between covering the missing work and submitting an incomplete deliverable. Neither is obviously right, and the decision should be made deliberately rather than by running out of time.

Covering it protects the group grade at a cost to you. Submitting incomplete, with a clear note of what was assigned to whom, protects your time and puts the situation in front of the instructor where it belongs. Where an assignment carries substantial weight, most students cover it — but do it having told the instructor first, so the effort is visible rather than invisible.

Afterwards, and the peer evaluation

Many group assignments include a peer evaluation and students routinely soften it out of awkwardness. Be accurate rather than harsh: describe what was contributed and what was not, without adjectives. That is what the form is for and instructors weigh it more than students assume.

And if the group project is one part of a course that has generally become more than your week holds, that is worth separating out. A single difficult group assignment is bad luck; a term where every assignment is a crisis is a load problem, and reducing the load is a better answer than absorbing everyone else's share twice more.

Tell the guild your tale.

Name the course, the program and the date it is due. A mentor credentialed in that subject reads it and replies with counsel and a figure within two hours. The reading costs nothing, and sometimes the answer is an honest no.