When Group Projects Go Bad
In another blog, someone mentioned the problems of group projects. In particular, the problem of the person (or persons) who want to ride on the efforts of the person who actually wants good grades and is willing to make the necessary efforts, even if it means doing the whole thing.
I did have one teacher who found a way to control for that. In addition to the written deliverable, she required us to do a presentation before the whole class. Every member of the group was expected to participate in it, and it would quickly become obvious if someone had made little or no contribution and was trying to BS their way through the presentation.
The first semester I had her, I had a great experience. We had a four-member group, and it really gelled. We had a good leader who knew how to organize and motivate without crossing the line to bullying, and who divided up the various aspects of the project, followed up to make sure everyone was making progress, and pulled all our contributions together to make the final written deliverable into a very nice piece.
Unfortunately, the second semester was not so inspiring. A bunch of the members of our class already knew who they wanted to do their groups with, and that left me and one other class member as leftovers. There was one remaining topic, so rather than trying to coax the other groups to each accept one of us, that person and I were assigned the remaining topic.
It was a disaster from the start. He and I never clicked, and instead of being a functioning group, we ended up being two people doing individual projects more or less in tandem. At the end, I sent him my work, and I expected he would turn it into something presentable. Instead, he just pasted mine to the end of his without any effort to smooth the style and formatting, or to even add an introduction, conclusion or other items that would make the two efforts into a cohesive whole. The result was horrible, and the instructor commented on how it did not exactly look like a group effort.
Any one else have group project horror stories, especially ones that go beyond the usual "ended up doing everybody's work because otherwise we'd all get F's"?
I did have one teacher who found a way to control for that. In addition to the written deliverable, she required us to do a presentation before the whole class. Every member of the group was expected to participate in it, and it would quickly become obvious if someone had made little or no contribution and was trying to BS their way through the presentation.
The first semester I had her, I had a great experience. We had a four-member group, and it really gelled. We had a good leader who knew how to organize and motivate without crossing the line to bullying, and who divided up the various aspects of the project, followed up to make sure everyone was making progress, and pulled all our contributions together to make the final written deliverable into a very nice piece.
Unfortunately, the second semester was not so inspiring. A bunch of the members of our class already knew who they wanted to do their groups with, and that left me and one other class member as leftovers. There was one remaining topic, so rather than trying to coax the other groups to each accept one of us, that person and I were assigned the remaining topic.
It was a disaster from the start. He and I never clicked, and instead of being a functioning group, we ended up being two people doing individual projects more or less in tandem. At the end, I sent him my work, and I expected he would turn it into something presentable. Instead, he just pasted mine to the end of his without any effort to smooth the style and formatting, or to even add an introduction, conclusion or other items that would make the two efforts into a cohesive whole. The result was horrible, and the instructor commented on how it did not exactly look like a group effort.
Any one else have group project horror stories, especially ones that go beyond the usual "ended up doing everybody's work because otherwise we'd all get F's"?