Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Can we talk about group projects for a second?

This is literally my least favorite thing about college. Group projects are some awful form of torture concocted by the devil to teach us to "work well with others". Cool, I get what you're going for here but it just doesn't ever work out this way. Ever.

In a perfect world, groups would be 3-4 people with schedules that coincided perfectly with everyone else's schedules. The group would meet the week the project was assigned and set a game plan to get the work done. Everyone would pull the same amount of weight and get everything done on time. Everyone would come to every meeting and contribute their opinions. Everyone would be a great public speaker and present perfectly at the end of the semester. There would be no need for group evaluations because everyone is awesome.

HA. HA HA HA. I wish we lived in a perfect world.

What really happens (at least to me): Every single professors assigns a group project of at least 6 people (last semester, I had 6 groups projects and this semester it's 5!). No one can meet on the same day. Even when a meeting time and day is set people magically get sick or just don't show up. And when you text them 10 minutes into the meetings, they never respond and you and 1 other person do all the work (yes, this happened tonight). This goes on for a few weeks and you continually get angry. One person begs everyone to work and get things turned in early or even on time. Instead, everything ends up late or turned in at theverylastsecondpossible. Then everyone is scrambling to put together a presentation and it sucks and I get angry.

Maybe not everyone has this experience but out of the 6 projects I had last semester at least 4 were this way and that tells me that professors need to reevaluate their decision to assigns projects in every single freaking class.

Sorry about my rant, but I know there are plenty of people that share my pain!

What's your worst group project experience?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I had an English professor who created groups that were unevenly stacked. In my group, there was me, who usually does all of the work but, then one guy is a hardcore gamer who is a professional slacker and nobly became the leader. Then there were two other members one was pretty much a druggie, she would always come to class late and stoned, then the last guy was an apathetic fool you did little to nothing. The gamer took the lead and I was cool with it because I thought my writing skills were weak and I trusted him. And when we presented our paper it was horrible. They added stuff that did not need to be said. I got a F, luckily my grade was high enough to take that hit and manage a C.

And I have another quick one. I took a poetry class for Gen ed and this was before the last story. The group contained me, a friend I had from high school, and a guy who lived down the hall in my dorm. I was going to be the main writer and my friend was going to help me with ideas and such, and the guy down the hall just had to write a paragraph (we didn't expect much from him), but we also had this one guy who used to work in the Adult film industry (he was probably not a star) bust into our group. He was suppose to write a little bit of the paper and email it to me. I never go the email and omitted his name when we submitted the paper. However, the teacher did not finish grading my paper because I came up with a real clever point and she thought I plagiarize so she stopped grading the paper and the film guy was not there on that day and this happened in front of the class. That was dilemma number 1 with the group. When we get our grades back, the film guy is upset and confused as to why he did not have a grade for the paper. And once again we have another out burst in front of the class.

I hope those stories do not bore you, and I hope that they made some sense. But you are not the only who hates group work.

Leslie said...

Oh gracious! Those sound like terrible groups! I'm glad to know other people feel my pain :)

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