This isn’t a major confession. It’s not something serious like admitting to first-degree joyriding or operating heavy machinery while under the influence of NyQuil.
It’s more along the lines of a social code violation, on par with eating pizza out of the trash can or having a crush on your niece.
It still seems like an admission of a problem, though. “My name is Justine,” I should enter the circle and say, “and I hate group projects.”
Maybe you won’t all ostracize me or scoot away when I say that. In college, it seems to be all right to dislike group projects.
It was worse in grade school when the whole class would cheer every time any sort of group work was announced. Inwardly, I would groan.
And inwardly, I still groan.
Some people cringe when they think about tests or about finals or essays or term papers or speeches. I’m fine with all of those. It’s the group projects I dread seeing on the syllabus every August and every January.
One major problem with group work is that it becomes largely a study in social dynamics. If groups are assigned, some of the group members inevitably don’t like each other. Even if they do, groups often bring together a set of people who may not otherwise associate. While this is fine – arguably even a good thing – members are less invested in the group. If they will never again interact with their temporary partners, they have little incentive to be a “good” group member.
This lack of incentive is precisely the social element that makes group projects academically fatal.
Knowing that others have an investment in the project and want to do well, people do less than their fair share.
Everyone banking on someone else doing the work, however, results in no one doing the work. Or, perhaps, one person doing the work. Or, most frequently, everyone doing the work, but everyone doing the work poorly. Group projects are supposed to result in a product that is greater than any individual could have produced alone, yet I nearly always feel that the end product is worse than what I would have produced myself.
It’s hard, I’ve learned, getting things done in a group. Decisions are multilateral, people don’t show up to meetings (or show up unprepared), someone needs someone else’s work to proceed with his own. The potential problems are endless.
More difficult than getting things done, though, is getting things done right. Members of a group have different goals and ideas about the quality of the final product. This affects the outcome of the project as a whole, not just students’ individual grades.
Group members’ differing visions often create tension in the group. I did several history projects in high school with two of my best friends.
Because we liked each other so well, we figured we could write the papers together.
All of us can be quite opinionated though, and the phrase “kicked in the pants at Vicksburg” was taken out or put back in every time someone left the computer to use the bathroom or get a drink.
Disliking group projects has caused me to think a lot about why teachers assign them in the first place.
A variety of reasons exist, I’m sure, but I think many teachers consider teamwork an important life skill.
Admittedly, they’re probably right. Working with others does come up in the real world. By the time students are in college, though, they should have the concepts of sharing and compromise pretty well figured out.
Either that, or they have realized people often don’t like sharing, we’re usually too selfish to compromise and working as a group does not always produce optimal results.
There seems to be an aura of awe surrounding the group project – a sense of deification that we need to dispel. We should look at these things for what they really are: projects created through trials and struggle, often put together at the last minute, contributed to by several people doing subpar work and synthesized and perfected by the one who has the highest expectations.
As a student, working in a group probably will not change the way you interact with others (except to make you exceptionally misanthropic when working on the project) nor will it make you a better person.
From an educator’s perspective, group work may have some advantages, but so does corporal punishment, and we got rid of that form of classroom torture 50 years ago.