Serious Group Projects

[HotFuzzBall]

Ok this is just going to be a rant sooo...

Anyways, I'm starting really dislike group projects. Even though I procrastinate a lot, I'm the type of person that still likes to communicate a lot and get things done. This year in particular, literally every group project I have been in, I always found myself either having a group that literally doesn't even talk / communicate or I will have group members that will literally refuse to do the work for whatever reason. This really applies to both groups that were randomly chosen or groups I picked.

So just recently I had to submit an incomplete group assignment because all of my group members were all like "we will get it done by this time" but they didn't actually get it done and it was like really close to the deadline so I just submitted an incomplete assignment which I'm kinda salty about.

I also remember I had a partner project with this other guy, but, he didn't tell me he transferred out of the class or talk to me in any way so I remember I had to cram about 2 hours of work in 45 minutes.

The one thing that really hits a nerve is when a group member that didn't contribute will be all like "why are you taking this so seriously" or "why didn't you put my name on the assignment." Well... I take classes quite seriously since my family is barely skimping by on getting me (as well as my siblings) into college so I don't want to let them down.

UGH this really frustrates me, I feel like I had better group project experiences in high school than in college right now >.>

 

[Hookah Doncic]

yea bro college group projects sucks. had to do alot of them and end up the same way

 

[lula_preso]

i hate those group projects as well.
i try to as much as possible alone. D: my course activities and schedules let me do so, so I am fine most of time.
when that is not possible, i have a agreement with my friends. usually, we do stuff with 4-5 ppl in each groups. most of the job can be done by two or three people if they work really hard. so that is what we do, as those 4 friends and me are fucking lazy: say that three people did everything in a project. In the next one, the other two would do everything and put the names of the first 3 there. It is working, but I would not reccomend because you skip much knowledge by simply doing nothing half of time.

however, the easiest thing to do is just try to find other people to do your stuff with, when you can't do it by yourself. try talking to other people, sitting in different seats each day to be around different people etc
it is very unlikely that everyone do not take classes seriously and so on. maybe you're being unlucky idk D: good luck tho

 

[Lemonade]

Yeah, that's pretty sucky. I've found a lot of people just need a small nudge though, like if you ask them to meet up and work on the project while everyone is physically present, people will usually show up and do things. If they don't come to group meetings for a group project then you have concrete evidence to go to the professor about.

 

[erisia]

A big part of my decision to do a PhD was the fact that i could avoid relying on other people to do work as much as possible. :)

 

[imas]

Yeah, no one I know irl is a fan of group projects. I've only been in university for 2 semesters now, and in the first semester, all group projects were basically being finished in the last minute due to people fucking around. It's not just strangers that's the problem. With strangers, you have the barrier of communication. But, in most cases, if you can manage get together, you will usually just get the work done and leave. However, problems arise because it's hard to do everything as a group and when the individual aspect comes into play, it's just upto luck. For instance, you divide up the work, but the other person does not get their work done on time or matching schedules etc. With friends, we communicate fine and can meet up more easily in general. But, when together, (I obviously don't speak for everyone) we just end up fucking around.

I've basically taken it as a given that you cannot work efficiently in a group, at least at this stage - where everyone's still somewhat laid back. As such, the solution I have come up with and applied successfully last semester, is to do all the required work to maximise my own marks. So, in groupwork where we're marked individually, like slide -> presentation, I would do the whole slide myself and then, divide up the parts vs. dividing up the work equally and have the slide creation dependant on everyone doing their parts well/on time. As for papers, well, I essentially did the final term paper for my last english course all by myself.* I realize this is probably not feasible to continue in further semesters, I'm just hoping people will start taking shit more seriously as they progress and I can find a better way of dividing work that makes sure we can divide work without anyone having to do more than another without any repercussions.

explaining the star

*Let me explain. The paper's work could be divided into 3 parts, writing up the essay in class [everyone wrote a paragraph] before submission of the first draft (not marked), writing up the first draft in class (marked), final draft (marked). So, before part 1, we had to do secondary research to back up the claims we made to back up our topic (had to be something argumentative) and the counterarguments against our topic. No one actually did this, so I basically got some (30 page long journal) articles that seemed related to our topic based on the title so we could show the teacher we did things. However, upon actually skimming through the stuff, I realized we couldn't use any of those to back up our points**. So, I told the group to write whatever the fuck they want for part 1 and we submitted that. In the meantime, I actually did proper research this time and got new articles. Then, I wrote up the first draft with the new information on google docs, which we then copied in class and submitted as the first draft. After the teacher sent the first draft back, I finished up the final draft and got it printed for submission. So, the group contributed in by writing things by hand for submission, but I did all the work.

**I should also explain what these points are. Well, before all the actual work, we had to pick from a bunch of given broad topics and then narrow it down to an argumentative statement, that we would then back up with 3 points/supporting arguments.

 

[Flare]

I really dislike working in group projects...mostly because only a small amount of that group will actually care to work on stuff while the most part will just procrastinate and act super lazy, besides (at least in my case) stuff would be delayed if some members aren't available to maintain progress on the project, so I prefer doing things on my own, I'd only do group projects if I have absolutely no idea what the project is about, or if I am forced to do it in order to move on.

 

[Grey Knight]

As an IT student, i have had my fair share of group projects.

Some people love to hate on them but there are few things that they forget when mentioning them , one of those is how easy you can meet new people through them, you just go up to a guy/group that is looking for a member and ta-da, you just exchanged numbers and got multiple new acquaintances that could develop further into good friends.

I straight up met the most of my girls through group projects, its just an infinite source of pussy waiting.


Another thing that people don't get is that team projects in school is the closest form of emulation of how your future work involvement will look like, for example:
If you are hired in a company you wont get to choose the people you are going to work with, you don't know what you supervisor will be like and you wont have control over your client's needs and idioms, even so you will be forced to be in the same environment with those guys for many many hours a day, every week every month and every year.

So you see, as long you are still in school you can effect a few things like choosing people that are reliable and cooperative, id suggest, instead of bitching about team projects, just make a shake up of you current friend cycle.

Now back on my freshman year, i used to be a sucker too, doing all the work and having no free time left, working with individuals that although they where good company, they where very unmotivated, so i had to make that very same decision back them, and yes i lost some friends but at least i excel on my studies.

unless those friends can provide you with free drugs or weed, then you just have to keep them around no matter how lazy they are

 

[Soul Fly]

it fucking sucks when the entire group gets a common grade. Like I don't care about my GPA or anything beyond maintaining a respectable number for scholarship/employment, but when you all get a B because Darryl was drunk last thursday and turned in something shitty at the 11th hour, or Megan confidently blabbered some fuckall bullshit during the presentation after not showing up..... THAT is some crap right there.

 

[toshimelonhead]

I'm in the minority, I guess. Group projects were a way of getting out of my shell and interacting with my classmates. I would rather collaborate with someone rather than compete against them.

 

[Kanburi]

I hated group projects in high school and university. In junior high school (middle school?), at least group projects were done in class so the teacher's presence kind of forced everyone to contribute in one way or another. But in high school and university, finding time outside of class to work together in itself was a pain. You'd get people who had different commitments (e.g. tutor after school, lessons of sorts, other classes, family events) and it was impossible to schedule a group meeting.

I had a class in university where we were to hand in evaluations of our group members and each person got a different grade, with the evaluations in consideration. That's one way to try to get everyone to work, I guess, but then if your teammates decide to conspire against you despite you having done most the work, you're screwed anyway.

 

[Nova]

cram about 2 hours of work in 45 minutes

shit dude life is tough

 

[Cerberax]

It really depends on who my groupmates are. If they're good students, actually care, and can be trusted to pull their own weight, then I'm totally okay with a group project. But I would much rather work alone than have to put up with terrible groupmates who either don't care or rely on everyone else to carry them through.

In the past, working alone has usually worked out better for me and caused me less stress because I knew exactly what had and had not been done and I didn't need to coordinate schedules with anyone else. But working/collaborating with other people is a life skill like any other so as aggravating as they can sometimes be, I think having group assignments is ultimately a good thing.

 

[Mystifi]

I hate group projects; I almost always get put in the conundrum of being stuck to do all the work for the project, but I'm willing to do it because I don't want my grades to suffer. It ends up with me doing the same thing the next time around because I've always done it before...
I've really always worked better alone, simply because I understand how I want to go about doing my work, and group projects really mess with that kinda system I have going on. I understand when people say that the point of group projects is to help one get used to teamwork, but when it isn't a team working together, is it really worth wanting to do it?

 

[ButteredToast]

As a student I hated using group projects and group work. As a high school history teacher, I love assigning them but I feel like I do it the right way.

As a student, I think the majority of my teachers saw traditional group work as a way to grade less work overall. It was way easier for them to grade a limited amount of papers and lesson plan time for group work. I remember having a lot of really... dumb group projects like a group paper and video projects that required after school time to complete. Things where one student needs to take the majority of the work and planning, and that student was typically me.

As a teacher, I use a lot of in class group work as a way to engage my students and I think it works a hell of a lot better than just individual work and is a good way for students to LEARN instead of being ASSESSED. What I mean by that is that I don't like being a dumbass "powerpoint and notebook" teacher. Don't get me wrong, I do that often and it is a skill that is needed for college. But I like doing debates, station activities, having groups of students teach chapters/sections, jigsaws, and games that utilize the aspects of working in a group.

Reasoning is that students are usually more accountable when they are in groups and the retention of the lesson and materials is significantly better than individual work. In life, a lot of my students are going to need to be able to work with others to accomplish tasks and sometimes they have to work with a variety of people. It's a skill that a lot of people, and especially young people, do not have.

The difference with me is that with my form of group learning, the students who choose not to do any work are not rewarded and students who do extra usually have a better understanding of the material. In essence, you get what you put in and the educator (me) is there as a form of quality insurance. Many of the group work I assign doesn't have grades, it is just in place of lecture. And the times I do have grades, it's still individually measured in the form of participation or a homework assignment based on what we did.

It definitely is not always the greatest thing, and I'm still learning how to best design lessons and how to teach effectively as I'm a new teacher. But group work can really be a beautiful thing if it is done in the correct way.

 

[Blazade]

As a student I hated using group projects and group work. As a high school history teacher, I love assigning them but I feel like I do it the right way.

As a student, I think the majority of my teachers saw traditional group work as a way to grade less work overall. It was way easier for them to grade a limited amount of papers and lesson plan time for group work. I remember having a lot of really... dumb group projects like a group paper and video projects that required after school time to complete. Things where one student needs to take the majority of the work and planning, and that student was typically me.

As a teacher, I use a lot of in class group work as a way to engage my students and I think it works a hell of a lot better than just individual work and is a good way for students to LEARN instead of being ASSESSED. What I mean by that is that I don't like being a dumbass "powerpoint and notebook" teacher. Don't get me wrong, I do that often and it is a skill that is needed for college. But I like doing debates, station activities, having groups of students teach chapters/sections, jigsaws, and games that utilize the aspects of working in a group.

Reasoning is that students are usually more accountable when they are in groups and the retention of the lesson and materials is significantly better than individual work. In life, a lot of my students are going to need to be able to work with others to accomplish tasks and sometimes they have to work with a variety of people. It's a skill that a lot of people, and especially young people, do not have.

The difference with me is that with my form of group learning, the students who choose not to do any work are not rewarded and students who do extra usually have a better understanding of the material. In essence, you get what you put in and the educator (me) is there as a form of quality insurance. Many of the group work I assign doesn't have grades, it is just in place of lecture. And the times I do have grades, it's still individually measured in the form of participation or a homework assignment based on what we did.

It definitely is not always the greatest thing, and I'm still learning how to best design lessons and how to teach effectively as I'm a new teacher. But group work can really be a beautiful thing if it is done in the correct way.

I do this too and got a lot of positive feedback for it. Letting students parse through problems together while I circle and assist often lets them talk through their core issues which can bring up the quality of the best and worst students. Sometimes those in the middle coast off of this, however, and they'll think they're doing better or they can remember something for the test when really the group is carrying them.

 

[Blazade]

Also I was forced to assign my classes actual weeks long, laborious, and incredibly stupid group projects but I gave them clear guidelines for getting Good Grades TM and if one of their group mates was a shitter they could tell me (outlining the responsibilities he/she shirked) and they'd be the only one to get a bad grade.

EDIT: This kind of tattletale policy only gets consistently enforceable when you have regular check ins with the groups (I put in about 3 half periods over the 6 weeks to do this) to see how well they're doing, what their questions are, and who's handling what aspects of the projects.

 

[A Love]

Yes, I understand your side perfectly, I think this is a pretty negative point in a school, students who are in high school or college should already be aware that a group work is not a "They do the rest and I Nothing "but a" Let's help one another to make our work very good, "this is really frustrating