> Of course like most group work, the workload is terribly lopsided toward the competent people, while the less competent people go get pizza and drinks for the others, and take up a little bit of work (which usually has to get rewritten anyway). Everyone ends up with the same grade.
I was never assigned a group project in college that I didn't feel was a complete waste of time, but this situation is actually pretty easy to avoid if the professor cares.
one of my professors would require group members to individually submit reviews of their teammates with each milestone on the project. basically "did they do their fair share, less, or more?" if on average your team felt you went above and beyond the call of duty, your individual grade would be the group grade multiplied by r > 1, and the opposite if everyone felt you were a slacker. the scores were normalized so if everyone rated each other as exceptional, r would just be 1. it didn't make the distribution of work perfect, but it made everyone pretty interested in at least appearing to contribute.
I was never assigned a group project in college that I didn't feel was a complete waste of time, but this situation is actually pretty easy to avoid if the professor cares.
one of my professors would require group members to individually submit reviews of their teammates with each milestone on the project. basically "did they do their fair share, less, or more?" if on average your team felt you went above and beyond the call of duty, your individual grade would be the group grade multiplied by r > 1, and the opposite if everyone felt you were a slacker. the scores were normalized so if everyone rated each other as exceptional, r would just be 1. it didn't make the distribution of work perfect, but it made everyone pretty interested in at least appearing to contribute.