The most dreaded of them all: group projects

An article written for the school newspaper.

--

Tendrils of dread slowly snake up your spine as your stomach flips and twists with each thump of your heart. Holding your breath and crossing your fingers, you look up as the teacher flips to the next screen, and . . . oh God.

As your friends in the class smile relievedly upon seeing their new group, you wish the earth would open up and swallow you whole—because you know these next several weeks will be ones of pain, torture, and sleep deprivation while your back breaks from carrying the grades of your teammates. Whatever will you do?

Sometimes life is just like that. It slings a whole crate’s worth of lemons at us and creates the worst group possible, all while making a different group (never yours) that you know will manage to pull off the perfect project.

Teachers might believe that skilled students with less hard-working ones will result in a mutually beneficial outcome in which they can simulate future real-world scenarios and obtain necessary collaborative skills. However, the reality is that these projects are, more often than not, mainly the work of one student rather than of cooperative effort. Even in the case when some teachers take it upon themselves to investigate the distribution of work, Google document history can easily be fabricated and peer assessments forged, which further cements the idea that group projects are working when in reality, they are not.

It is not even just about the grades—a group project like this is mentally exhausting, draining, and frustrating for the few stellar students who burden themselves with the Herculean task of even completing the project in time. Combined with the resentment certain group members feel as a result of having to do most of the work and submit it under the guise of “collaborative work,” salt is added to the wound when students that participated begrudgingly give credit to students who have not worked because their own grade depends on proof of cooperation.

It is ironic, then, to see that while original work is praised in the SIS community, these group projects that pair stronger students with weaker ones are so common in classrooms when in fact this leads to students free-loading off of the work of others. Whether it is meant to briefly cushion the grades of less hard-working students or simply balance out groups in skill level to raise the class average, this leads to several problems within these group projects.

The biggest, most obviously pressing issue of all is that weaker students lose the valuable chance to learn the content when they are constantly set up in groups meant to “help” them. Stronger students, who do not want their grades potentially compromised by the work of others, take over the work of weaker students—meaning that if this happens continuously, the knowledge and skill gap between students only increases and keeps students stuck in the same vicious cycle for the next group project. Even if weaker students receive a temporary bump to their grade, the lack of knowledge these students possess will be apparent on tests and future tasks—at which point it is far too late to build up necessary knowledge skills and work ethic. As shown by a study by the University of Denver, small, individual assignments taught content to students better than larger group projects did because students learned all content instead of divvying it up amongst themselves and creating gaps in their knowledge.

Furthermore, the goal of collaboration is further harmed when members with drastically different skill levels are paired together. Underlying tensions rise as the stronger student finds themselves having to learn the content of the group project not only for themselves, but to teach the rest of their members. The Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University even advises teachers that in the case of extreme skill differences, groups should be formed by separating weaker and stronger students instead of in a mixed-skills approach.

In order to foster a sense of agency among students, one solution might be for students to create their own groups. Though not perfect, the benefit offered is that it fosters a sense of agency among students to match up with those who they know they will be able to collaborate with or have a similar skill level to. If teachers do not want to go this far, they may allow students to pick one or two students with whom they would prefer not to work. One potential drawback is that this may lead to everyone writing down the same students' names, which may not make much of a difference in the end.

Even better, teachers could simply change the type of assignments they assign as group projects in the first place. A study from the University of Oklahoma found that group research papers, or group writing assignments—which are coincidentally some of the most commonly assigned projects in SIS—are the worst in promoting collaboration because of how individualistic writing is as a task in the first place. If teachers find themselves primarily assigning these types of projects, perhaps it would be wiser to keep group projects out of the curriculum in classes heavily dependent on writing regardless of skill level.