Although it is an inevitable facet of college, the group project assignment may be the most unproductive form of learning we encounter. To consider it a form of learning is a stretch.
Professors and instructors may say, “Oh, what a great way to promote team-building skills and learn to work with others.”
But this almost never happens.
Let me propose a quick recap of how group projects go down.
First, your professor or instructor announces that, instead of being an old fashioned teacher and assigning you a term paper, he or she will be giving you an opportunity to work in groups.
Sounds great right? Wrong.
Professors can be the best salesmen sometimes, selling you on the idea that you’ve got so much time to get to work on this project and that they are giving you a great advantage with such a head start.
For those who aren’t sitting on a trust fund and care somewhat for their grades, the following will ensue.
You, as well as every one of your potential group members — save maybe the overly sweet girl who sits in the front row, asks all the questions and has her binders color-coded with pink and purple tabs — will proceed to put this project off.
What a group project is supposed to promote — open communication and interaction — proves to be the hindrance of the project.
Since our classes are a short semester long, and for the most part you do not know anyone in your class, much less your group, there is not much incentive to meet people who will not be around you for much longer. Therefore, there is not much communication.
If you have taken a lower-level foreign language you will know what I mean. You don’t know a soul in your class, so you don’t want to open your mouth and sound like a fool.
Likewise, as the semester passes your group will initiate a group email, which no one will have the urge to check often. Ideas will be passed around timidly.
Those ideas that are bad will hang around for awhile because no one wants their toes to be stepped on, and those ideas that may have potential may ride the bench for the reason no one wants to sound like the group idiot.
So as the semester goes on with parties, football games, other exams and other papers, suddenly you get an email from your professor: “Hope you guys having been working diligently with your group. The end of semester group project is coming up.”
Of course you haven’t. No one in your group has anything to do with anything in your life outside of this group project.
So it’s crunch time, and the group finally meets at the front of Middleton, where you then proceed to deliberate over where in Middleton the group should go over the project. This is the deciding point. Whoever takes the initiative as to where you all should sit will most likely lead the group and be the final editor in the project.
In other words, the one who deserves all the credit.
This may be you, because you are fed up with how this project is proceeding and want it done, or maybe it’s the color-coded binder girl who has already done it. In that case, celebrate, and then check her work.
But perhaps the most wrong portion of a group project is the most important — how they are graded.
Nine times out of ten it will be one collective grade per group for each member. The obvious problem here is the existence of freeloaders, whom each professor would deem unacceptable, but lack the care to prevent them or do anything about when it does occur.
You’ll get, “Tough. It happens.”
Even if group members are allowed to grade each other individually, that will not account for the group’s entire grade, and rarely does anyone give the freeloader the grade they deserve.
In smaller, upper-level, major-specific courses, group work is exponentially more feasible and productive.
Group projects are busy work that do not promote learning, but more so memorizing; do not endorse actual group work, but create a “messiah” of the group. Regardless, they are still inevitable.
Tough. They happen.
Chris Ortte is a 21-year-old political science senior from Lafayette.