Group Projects. Just hearing their name makes you want to curl into a ball and hide. Dread fills every ounce of your body and you begin to wonder if you could just do the entire project by yourself. It’s not because you want to do all the work; you just know it’s the inevitable. Sure, sometimes you have painless experiences where everyone participates and the presentation goes smoothly. But that’s just not always the reality.
For some reason, people feel that once they’re assigned to a group their commitment to the completion of the assignment diminishes. That they don’t have to do anything because the group will finish the assignment and add their name before they turn it in. Or on the chance that it’s a group presentation, they only show up to the last meeting (or right before the presentation) to ask which slides they get to present. And by present, I mean stumble through while reading off of a paper, pretending to know what they’re talking about when everyone knows they don’t. This makes the whole group look bad.
In my own experience, I’ve had to work with people who are more of the kind to contribute nothing. This is frustrating because when putting together a presentation, the non-contributor types are not helpful. Group projects turn hard-working students into frustrated, crazed messes, all because in most cases, professors assign grades based on the end product — so if we don’t do all the work (because our members do nothing) then we’re stuck with a bad grade.
I’ve also had group project experience where people show up to meeting, but then just agree with whatever is said. They add nothing else of their own thought. This is frustrating because while it appears as though everyone is working together, the ones coming up with the ideas are the only ones actually doing any work. Those few still end up doing the project by themselves and are turned into frustrated, crazed messes.
We all hate group projects because there’s always one of those people in our groups. We hate people letting us down. We hate that in the end we’re left doing all the work on something we’d rather have done on our own terms and without having to put someone’s name (who didn’t do work) on the work we did. Professors assign these types of assignments because they want us to learn teamwork, etc. for the “real world”. But all group projects really teach us is that if we want something done, it’s best we just do it ourselves rather than relying on others.