Tattle-Taylor | No strength in numbers

Group projects are either a blessing or a curse to students, with very few in-betweens.

To overachieving students who are certain that no one in the class will be able to work on an adjacent level, group projects are torture. These students are certain that the rest of their group will drag down the group grade, or else the overachiever will end up doing the entire project alone.

For underachieving students who dread research papers and are only barely passing the class, group projects are a godsend, saving them from floundering alone in a struggle to maximize a very crucial 30 to 40 percent of their grade.

Inevitably, someone ends up doing more than his or her fair share of work, and someone else ends up doing less. Group projects often lead to unfair work distribution and some students receiving grades that they don’t deserve.

Marc Abundo, a Wharton freshman who took Management 100 — a class that heavily utilizes group work — last semester, agreed. “There was an unfair allocation of work,” he said. “I was one of the people who didn’t do a fair share.”

Because of the unequal proportions of work that often result from group projects, many students find themselves frustrated and overworked.

“It does add more pressure to the amount of work you have to do,” Wharton freshman Junia Zhang said. “The people who don’t do their fair share of work add to your share.”

However, grades often fail to reflect that. Too often, we find ourselves paired with grade moochers — or sometimes even mooch ourselves — leading to resentment and unnecessary added responsibilities for ourselves or our partners.

Furthermore, group projects make it difficult to find time to do the work. For independent projects, you can eke out a few hours of work here and there between — or even during — classes, work and meals.

For group projects, meetings are usually preceded by several hours or days of phone tag, text-message waiting periods and e-mail conversations that seem to go nowhere. It’s difficult to find time in which everyone is able to meet. Once an acceptable time is found, then comes the stalker game, in which one member of the group tries frantically to secure a study room in Van Pelt Library or Huntsman Hall. Simply preparing to do the project becomes a project in itself.

Sure, it’s true that we can all stand to learn from the importance of teamwork. We’ll be expected to be able to be team players when we are all working jobs.

“No matter what we do in life — in or out of the workplace — we need to know how to use our influence and to work with others,” Anne Greenhalgh, a Management 100 professor, said in an e-mail. “Courses that feature group work have the potential to coach leadership, teamwork, and communication. Meeting this potential is difficult, but absolutely worth the effort.”

However, while the skills we learn from group work will be important for our future jobs, there’s a big difference in how we will be evaluated by employers as opposed to the way we are by our professors. Future employers will be better equipped to tailor our grades to what they know of our work ethic, which our professors can’t do. Employers won’t be as rushed and pressed for time to meet grading deadlines for hundreds of faceless students as our professors and teaching assistants are.

There are things that we can stand to learn from group projects. But we shouldn’t have to sacrifice our GPAs to learn them. If professors continue to assign group projects, they must also devise better methods of distinguishing between the work of the individual students within the group.

Taylor Hawes is a College sophomore from Philadelphia. Her e-mail address is hawes@theDP.com. Tattle-Taylor appears every other Tuesday.

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