A flunk can be described as,"Anyone that is ignorant, sexist, lazy, and or a jerk in class". A flunk can be a person who refuses to listen, is universally hated by classmates and co-workers, and will likely be working with you on a group project. If you're not stuck with a flunk now, you will be during your time in college. Like Mike Tyson in the greatest Nintendo game of all time, a flunk is waiting for you. Or more specifically, waiting to ruin your life.

What do you do when you have a flunk in your group? Don't confront them in a public setting. The flunk is always ready to pounce and waste precious minutes of everyone's life at the first sign of an audience. Wasting your time in meeting solo with them is also not productive. No matter how much you may hate group projects, since you're reading this, it is safe to assume you are the one that must neutralize the flunk and save the day.

Thankfully, the tools needed to handle a flunk are freely available. I discovered these tools when dealing with my own flunk at SUNY Potsdam. On the first day, the professor made each group create a Google Group to allow for better communication between group members. In my experience, both in the workforce and in college, these online discussion groups always wind up getting neglected. So why bother? Google Groups is an inefficient way to collaborate thanks to Facebook. The research shows most of us spend an awful lot of time on there, so one could assume your teammates may be comfortable using this platform already.

It's easy to get on Facebook. Once you have an account, you can create a group for your project and set up a closed group for only your project members. There you can discuss, share multimedia files, and keep an online record of all discussions. OK, not all discussions, users still have the ability to delete their own posts, so it'll be up to you to pay special attention to your flunk's postings in the group, especially when they inhibit your group's progress. Thanks to applications like Zoho, for those of you without expensive office software, you can have your own suite of programs within Facebook to utilize and work on your project for free.

How else does Facebook take care of your flunk? It levels the playing field. I think it's a waste of your time to interact with a flunk in a physical setting. You don't have a way to keep track of the mouth breathing inspired gold they generate, and they may intimidate other group members from speaking up and participating in person. Online, you can neutralize a flunk's personality and can keep them accountable for their actions, or inactions, and can report to your boss or professor when they want details on the project's progress.

This is one of the few instances where going online is a great way to be productive when working with a group. Get a Facebook account, create a group for your project, do a search for "Zoho" in the search box, and then check out the application to get team back on the path of productivity and out of the flunk's stupefying embrace.