Fellow educators: do you assign group projects to your students? I almost never do because I can’t face having to arbitrate between those who did all the work and those who did nothing.
When a group project is unavoidable, I always give everybody in the group their own grade. I don’t get the point of the one-grade-per-the-entire-group practice. What’s the point other than making the teacher’s life easier? What can be the pedagogic rationale?
I completely agree. I have always been horrified by the assigning of group projects. I have often had students tell me of group projects they had to do for classes in other departments, wherein one person did all the work so as not to get a failing grade. The students who did nothing got the same grade, of course.
I do not understand how you can possibly give individual grades in a group, however.
It’s easier to evaluate people individually in my discipline because everybody’s command of Spanish is different and I can evaluate based on fluency, richness of vocabulary, appropriate use of idiomatic expressions, complexity of grammar structures, etc.
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I don’t do graded group projects. I always loathed group projects (not least because of the socially awkward penguin syndrome*) but most Polish students like them so I have students pair off or form threesomes for class activies, but nothing graded.
I also hate oral exams that have two or three studnets at a time (and have to work with some instructors who loooooove them). I warn the students that picking their best friend to do the exam with is usually a terrible idea but do they listen? Noooooo……..
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I also had to get rid of group oral exams. They were simply not working.
Somebody I know assigns group final essays. I have no idea how this can work. How can you produce collective writing that’s longer than a paragraph?
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My friend recently had to do one of these group essays. I don’t know how other teachers do it, but in this case each person was assigned a specific part to contribute. Naturally, however, all the other people in the group didn’t care, and my friend had to write up the whole thing herself.
As a student, I absolutely loathe group projects. I understand their necessity in a lab situation, especially when working on actual lab reports (those designed to look like papers). The teachers I’ve had have handled those reports really well, with group members being assigned alternating parts so collaboration is mostly relegated to bouncing ideas and editing. But outside of that, I really don’t see the point.
How in the world can group oral exams even work?
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My experience regarding pair / group assignments (not in literature, but in something not very useful anyway):
The same group of students may decide to do several final group projects for different classes. Each person does one group project (alone), and gets several other projects from others.
As for submitting assignments in pairs during semester: each person does ~ half of assignments (alone). If two people try to do together, it’s harder logistically and won’t take much less time anyway.
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I don’t get the point of the one-grade-per-the-entire-group practice. What’s the point other than making the teacher’s life easier? What can be the pedagogic rationale?
There is no pedagogic rationale. It prepares students for the workplace. Every workplace has slackers, worker bees, people who opportunistically take credit and people who get no credit. 
For the most part you don’t get to choose your coworkers.
Somebody I know assigns group final essays. I have no idea how this can work. How can you produce collective writing that’s longer than a paragraph?
Group essays prepare students for the pain of committees and focus grouped statements. :p
I loathed group projects with a passion. I never did tutoring either because it too often turned out to be “teach me everything in this course the night before the exam”.
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I assign group presentations (no group essay however. I can’t even imagine how that would work.) I assign long complicated presentations that take an entire class period and there isn’t time for each student to do such a presentation individually. If the presentation is good (B to A range), I assign one group grade. It’s almost impossible to tell who did what specifically– especially in an effective presentation. If the presentation is weak (below a B), I ask each student to detail what they specifically contributed and assign grades accordingly.
Generally, the presentations are quite good. I weigh them heavily and the pressure of presenting for an hour in front of their classmates seems to motivate most students to do well. Occasionally a lazy student does benefit from his/her hard working group mates. But the lazy student will usually flub up somewhere else (paper, exams etc). So by the end of the semester, the final grades tend to even out.
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And they don’t come to you to complain about Betsy who is not doing anything at all or Josh who never shows up? That’s my main fear, that I will have to moderate these group relationships.
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No. I haven’t really had any complaints. The only time I ever had a complaint over the years was when there was a real genuinely problematic student that was just impossible for anybody (including me) to deal with.
I tell the students that officially the grade is individual but that for strong presentation, generally everyone gets the same grade. Maybe that alleviates pressure? Also, I give them the assignment and allow them to pick their own partners during the second week of school. So I give them loads of time to work on it and freedom of choice. (But students sign up by topic. So students who are shy/don’t know anybody don’t need to feel pressured to find partners. But generally students sign up for topics with people they know.)
This generation of students is so used to group work that they rarely raise an eyebrow when I assign it. They seem to know how to work cooperatively. I just haven’t really experienced many problems with it.
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I was not a fan of group projects unless I knew the other people involved really well and could trust them to get their portions in on time. Once I got a good group together, we could do some really amazing things (I had some friends that I did team-based academic competitions with, and we worked like a well-oiled machine all together). In fact, for the last class I ever took with group projects, you were allowed to work in groups of any size so long as you included an explanation at the end of what everyone’s contributions were. I trusted no one in that class. Luckily, any size included 1, so I did everything by myself. Kicked everyone’s butt grade-wise too 😉
I hate group projects with a fiery passion. In school, the other kids wouldn’t do shit and I hated having to interact with these lazy dumbasses. I’d end up doing the paper because I didn’t want to fail. It’s just a lazy way for the teacher to do less work
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I don’t particularly like them. When I was a student, I managed to wiggle my way out of quite a few of them by just staying silent when the groups were being made up, picking a topic and just working on it on my own. Apparently, you don’t need much beyond a shrug to explain why you “don’t have a group” if your work is good enough.
I like the things that a group project thing seems to want to teach, in principle at least. Sometimes, your individual contribution will matter diddly squat to the end result if you don’t work with 0ther people, and they with you. But if this is the principle that’s being taught, there’s little actual instruction on it, and instead you’re supposed to figure it out on your own.
This is made even worse by the fact that most of these group assignments don’t really need a group to do them. They are typically a smaller job than the sum of what the individuals would have had to produce were they working on their own.
One group project-like thing that I actually liked participating in was a political crisis simulation. There was a competitive element to it – you weren’t just performing as part of a group, you were competing against other teams while simultaneuosly trying to convince them to do what you wanted them to do, like trust you for five minutes and not go into the stupid war that runs counter to their own damned interests.
There amount of material was too much for one person to learn, and even if it hadn’t been, the fact that you needed to talk to several other groups at the same time meant that you couldn’t rely on a single all-knowing person even if you wanted to. So, we actually had to work out a general game plan, a communication strategy, and divvy up appropriate roles. It all crashed and burned eventually, of course, but the whole thing gave me a much clearer picture of how teams can actually work and how they actually fail.
Don’t ask me how our instructors managed to grade that thing, though. 🙂
Never assign them. Everyone gets graded on his/her own personal merit.
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I studied journalism and we had a very simple structure to solve this. One person was the ‘chief editor’ and lead the project. At the end, he gives everyone a grade, and everyone grades him or her. That way, you have checks and balances and can spot when people are lashing out against each other.
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I went to a workshop on group projects offered by our center for teaching back in the spring. The person leading the workshop said that most students hate group projects because almost all group projects are very poorly designed. And the workshop recommendations were wildly different than any group project I ever experienced. Their strongest recommendation was that each group must create a set of rules for the group project as the very first step of the project. The rules should includes procedures for resolving conflicts, rules about communication, a schedule of meetings, and a system peer evaluation and penalties for those who don’t show up to meetings or don’t complete their sections of work by the agreed deadlines. They told of one instructor who required a group selfie be taken at each meeting so that he knew who was there and actually doing the work without making the others tell on that person. The rules for the groups were also supposed to have provisions for kicking people out of groups (= automatic F on the assignment) after they had missed a certain number of meetings or deadlines. The recommended grading scheme was also somewhat complicated, with a portion of the total grade being assigned to the whole project, but other portions being assigned to individuals for the quality of their individual contributions. They really emphasized that the instructor should set a framework for rules but not actually give the rules, i.e. rules must address issues A, B, and C, but that the students had to negotiate the details of the rules. The claim is that the group members would happily enforce the rules they created for themselves, but would not stick to rules handed down by the instructor. I haven’t had the chance to try any of these ideas out, but the workshop totally changed my perception of what a group project could be.
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This sounds great but the whole thing becomes incredibly high-maintenance. In my discipline, it would be great to have students design a system of rules in the language of instruction. Forcing them to do it, though, is another thing altogether.
Thank you, this is a very helpful comment.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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