VMWare running ridiculously slow

I'm in a class that requires I use VMWare virtual machines, however it's running very slow. I had a meeting with my professor to try and trouble shoot why but we both can't seem to find a reason.

I got plenty of ram, I shut down a few programs that seemed to be causing my computer to run slow and made sure the VMs were in my actual drive not the cloud but is still very sluggish.