Why Nobody Likes Group Projects and Everyone Gets Them Anyway

Group projects.

I’m sorry, I should have given you more warning before including something so terrifying in this blog post. Do you need a few minutes?

Let’s wade in slowly.

groouuuu….

ouuuppp…

projects.

(phew!)

I have never encountered a single student who seemed pleased to be given a group, rather than individual, project. As a student, I sure wasn’t. Group projects were awkward for a ton of reasons. Was I going to have control of my grade? Would I be able to reach the standards I set for my own work? Would I have to do the work myself or else wait for late and lazy classmates?

And that’s not to mention the social terrors. Would people I thought were my friends let me into their groups, or would I awkwardly have to ask to be let into someone else’s? If the class was full of my friends, how would we split up into multiple groups?

Besides that, once you were in a group project, you had to figure out times to meet, agree on how to approach the task(s) at hand, and resolve any conflicts without harming the final product.

As an instructor, I can tell you that we are constantly worried about how to administer group projects in ways students find fair and less stressful. We know everyone hates them. So why do we give them out anyway?

Let’s get the most common accusation out of the way: we do it only to give ourselves a smaller marking burden.

Sure, there’s some truth in that — if I have the choice to mark 6 papers or mark 30 papers, I’m not going to pretend that I feel the same way about each option. But if all I cared about was ease of marking, I’d make every project a group project and ignore students’ complaints about some teammates doing less work than others. Mediating group conflicts is often harder work than simply marking separate papers.

Bottom line, we — instructors and teachers as individuals and/or the coordinators who impose standards on the entire course — give group assignments because there’s something we can’t teach any other way.

Sometimes, especially if we’re using best practices for group work, we have an activity that’s simply too large for any one student to tackle. We need to divide the workload.

More often, the skill itself is interpersonal. For example, teaching professional communication, I want my students to learn how to write collaboratively, how to consolidate research with a team, and how to give constructive criticism on someone else’s writing. All these skills are common in industry, and there’s no good way to learn them without working with others.

In addition, sometimes I put my students in groups because working together makes practicing certain skills feel less daunting. For instance, students who won’t put up their hands in class to offer opinions will discuss what they think with their classmates; people who are nervous about public speaking on their own find it easier to dip a toe in the waters with a group presentation.

For these reasons, group projects are sometimes necessary. In the work world — whatever your work world, unless you’re a professional hermit (or possibly even then, since you still have to find out and do what your employers want) — you’ll probably depend on other people. Some of the skills needed to work with others successfully have to be obtained through practice; some skills can be learned only through collaboration.

Unfortunately, as my boyfriend points out, the main difference between the work world and the educational world is that bad employees can be reported and fired or demoted. At school, everyone is meant to learn: I can’t (shouldn’t!) fire a student. That means that even if in the end, I decide to fail one student in the group for doing nothing, the rest of the group still has to work around Captain Black Hole Singularity of Assigned Tasks for the duration of the project.

Now, the work world isn’t always ideal: there are plenty of times you have to suck it up and work with someone incompetent, unmotivated, or both. And there are times when it would be professionally unwise to report a colleague’s bad behaviour. But I see the point: being in an environment where the person in authority cares only whether the job gets done is different than being in one where the people in authority care mainly about the learning experience for each group member.

As I see it, a lot of the stress boils down to the conflict between how society treats grades and how grades are best used to actually foster learning. Getting a single C shouldn’t be disaster for an A student — it should be a sign that the student needs to work on a particular competency or understanding. But that’s not how it works in real life.

In real life, that C can pull down a student’s final grade to a point they deem irrecoverable. And they need their grades at a certain level to maintain scholarships, continue in the program of their choice, or just feel worthy in a system that tells them their GPA reflects their intelligence.

As a treasure-hunt designer, I learned to balance the rules to motivate my players to have the goals I wanted for them without weighing too heavily on the immediate benefit of obtaining those goals. For example, in my murder mystery, I wanted to encourage players to treat their characters’ secrets as important without distracting everyone from the main trail of puzzles.

But the motivation/reward system in conventional classroom-based learning is unbalanced. We want grades to do so many things: indicate a student’s level of competency, give feedback to a student on the quality of their work on a particular assignment, give feedback to a student on the quality of their work in the course as a whole, show how hard a student worked in the course, and motivate the student to work harder to get better outcomes. But when one bad grade can upend a student’s life, is it any wonder that the possibility of getting a B- on a group project is more terrifying for someone with a 4.0 GPA than not learning anything from working with others?

I used to be (still am, let’s face it) the bossy team member who’d do all the work myself if the teacher or professor let me. I remember taking over writing assignments and chemistry labs and working as an individual whenever I was allowed the option.

But, you know, when I think back, the assignments where I steamrolled people didn’t teach me anything new (except that I’m a dictatorial jerk, but I kinda should’ve known that already). Sure, it was great getting the final mark I wanted, but, in the end, the subject I loved the most and that taught me the most was the one that forced me to collaborate with others: drama.

I stuck with drama because you can’t get away with doing all the work yourself. It was the only class in both high school and university that I didn’t spend writing novels in my notebooks and pretending to listen, because I couldn’t. Drama posed the most enticing challenge for me precisely because it taught me interpersonal skills in a hands-on environment.

So I don’t know what to say to students who hate group projects. Yes, they can feel very unfair. Yes, they can sometimes be very unfair. Yes, students with higher skill levels sometimes feel like they have to either do all the work or suffer a grade decrease based on someone else’s incompetence. But not always — I hope, not most of the time. And the learning experience group projects provide is one that I can’t give students any other way.

For now, I’m going to keep giving them and trying out new methods to help make students feel like everyone on their team is accountable.