Alright, SNHUdents, it’s that time of year again. It’s almost halfway through the Spring semester, so not only does that mean Midterms are fast approaching but also the bane of our existences: group projects. Somehow, the message still hasn’t gotten back to teachers and professors. Students have been bemoaning group projects since middle school and yet, once again we are forced to work together with people we don’t know in order to complete a project that’s worth a quarter of our grade.
Whenever a group project is assigned it essentially turns any class into a lottery. The best case scenario, or winning ticket, gets a partners who work well with together, and who evenly divide the work getting it done effectively and on time. However, much like the real lottery this these wins are far and few between. The more likely scenario is getting partnered with at least one person who refuses to do any work, one person who disagrees with every plan that is made, and one person who doesn’t communicate with the group and gets their work done separately.
The idea behind group projects isn’t completely awful: Students working together to achieve a common goal. However, in practice, it hardly ever works. Everybody gets work done in different ways and everybody gets along with different people, and yet somehow, professors always seem to partner students up. It’s not wonder hardly any work gets done given the radon assortment of assigned “friends”.
The only saving grace for group projects is when the professor allows students to pick their own groups. But even then there are always some students who don’t have friends in class and are forced into a group with other randoms like them or a group of friends who will exclude them from all communication. At that point, the professor might as well have assigned the groups themselves.
Group projects just do not and will never work out well for the students involved. If professors want to still use them, then maybe they should make take a hint from the admissions department and give their students a form to fill out about how they best complete group work and what type of people they work well with.
If that’s too much, though, most students would rather do projects on their own, anyway.
