Group work is the worst

For decades, professors have created ways to make the lives of the college student much harder than it needs to be. They’ve tried it all: assigning more homework, making their PowerPoints even more worthless and requiring students to buy bundled textbooks.

But then they found the cruelest, most disgusting way to rob us of our faith in humanity and turn students against each other: group work. I picture it — the sinister plot — unfolding something like this: a group of professors sit down for a meeting.

They brainstorm how to make their curriculum more difficult because students have caught up to the material. Of course, this is teacher speak for “ways to make students spend more time on busy work.”

After two hours spent shooting down ideas, one of the professors says, “Guys, why don’t we make the students do what we are doing right now? Make them work in groups!”

All the professors stop talking; they’ve realized how brilliant the idea sounds. Everybody knows meetings are a terrible waste of time, and even worse, it forces people to schedule around each other.

For students, this means working around four or five schedules that don’t free up until the evening, just what everyone wants to do when they are ‘done’ with their school day.  The thing is, group work isn’t really group work; it’s divvied-up work.

Group meetings are used to divide the work into portions each person will take home and complete on their own. Once each part is complete, the team just slaps it all into the same file and calls it a collaborative effort.

Wait, I forgot to mention the part where one group member’s writing makes you question how they passed an entry-level English class. A silent rage builds inside as you realize that instead of doing absolutely nothing tonight like you planned, you will be re-writing their portion of the project.

Of course, not every group member is the type to re-write another person’s part so they can save their own grade. There are students that leech off other members or manage to always have a schedule conflict, and then there are the students that won’t say a word the entire meeting.

It’s sad, but whenever I go into a group, I have the expectation that about 50 percent of the team members will actually make worthwhile contributions. I understand the benefits of group work, and I see the benefits of learning how to work with other people to achieve a common goal, but not all students have a common goal.

Like so many things in the academic world, group work is imperfect and utilized incorrectly. The point is some classes are not suitable for having group projects on the side. Simply assigning people to groups of four or five kids and dishing out case studies to write reports on is more annoying than anything.

So what separates good and bad when it comes to group work? In my opinion, it all has to do with the professor. If professors wish to have this type of interactive material, they must structure their class to fit the groups and maintain a higher level of involvement.

­— agreiner@indiana.edu