As we begin winding down from this semester and begin to deck the halls, there is one thing that keeps preventing me from achieving the relaxation and relief that comes with Christmas break… Group projects. These are widely useless and lead to unneeded stress and an unfortunate amount of swearing and built up anger. These are largely the reasons I have for contemplating dropping out, although there is no chance I would group projects are pushing me over the edge and I might just quit.
The first thing wrong with group projects is you have no idea how other people in your group operate. Even if they are your friends you have no idea how proactive they are. It only gets worse when you are assigned a group of strangers to work with. It is a lot easier to tell your friend to pull their head out of their ass than some random kid you met three days prior. In my group projects I prefer to start promptly allowing time for ideas to progress and develop at a health manner. However, this semester all three of my groups have decided the best time to start thinking about the project is approximately a day or two before it is due. Then everyone ends up scrambling trying to switch their schedules to meet so they do not end up getting docked by their group mates in the peer evaluations.
Second worst thing, peer evaluations. I simultaneously love and hate having the fate of someone else’s grade in my hand. This semester especially, the peer evaluations can knock a person down to failing or doing significantly worse than the rest of the group. Where I try to put in 100% on all my group projects many people sit back, relax, and enjoy reaping the benefits of the one or two dedicated people in the group. Although the peer evaluations are to subjectively grade the person I find it difficult to actually give people lower than an 80% ever. Even if they accomplished nothing, didn’t touch the Google slides or docs or show up, just because it is such a major part of their grade. However, I also find it difficult to grade people I am friends with because I do not want them to find out what I did. This semester I gave two 70%, which in the class is fine because as long as the score is above the 70% they will receive the same letter grade as the rest of the group, however I know I could have gotten away with giving one of them a 50%. Some people deserve it, I swear, I am not some jerk who lives to destroy people’s GPA.
The final reason group projects are the worst are the people. One of my groups had a 500 word paper due and we met the night before, of course, and sat in one of the study rooms in the library. Of the five group mates one was 35 minutes late. We were essentially done by that point. But of the four people sitting in the room there were two people typing on the doc (me and another team mate), one person sitting there chattering on about nothing and the fourth person was filling out a required form. So three people doing work with two doing all the heavy lifting. When the fifth person decided to show up he read the document and said “it looks good”. Thanks for your approval jackass. Anyhow, if you meet someone who says they love group projects, run from them, they are probably the person who contributes nothing to the group and just reaps the benefits.
Group projects may very well be the death of me. I can think of nothing worse than having to finish up my fourth power point and texting group-mates to at least look over it before submitting it. Here are the key things to remember about group projects: they are not fun, you will learn nothing, your friends will get tired of hearing you complain, when your project is over you will never talk to those people again, and every professor who assigns a group project has a special place reserved for them in hell. During this horrible group project season remember to keep your cool, try screaming into a pillow, crying to your mom on the phone, and passive aggressively responding to your group mates texts about meeting three hours before it is due. Remember we are almost to the most wonderful time of the year, stay strong and complete the projects. Santa might treat you extra nice this year because of it.