[Everlag]

As someone at the end of their undergrad, I have to agree that group based projects trend towards being unpleasant. The article describes the distribution of work harming full understanding of the content when all people contribute, however that's usually the best case.

Most students are oversubscribed with four or five classes. There tends to always be some portion of a group which contributes trivially or simply doesn't. When you've got a group of five, one is typically unreachable, apathetic, or just exhausted. Pairs are a gamble, a bad partner being a massive workload. When you're the person who's carrying the group, you usually end up grokking everything in the project because you touched all of it. However, since you touched all of it, you're exhausted and likely pissed.

What I've found works is individual work sample projects, particularly those timeboxed to 'hopefully a lab period but you have a week'. The GPGPU course at my school has labs which are 'fill in the blanks' for cuda code. As the course goes on, those blanks get progressively more complex and make you flex your core understanding of the course. For more theory driven courses, the standard set of assignments works nicely.

As an aside, group projects seem to be partially motivated by the TAs and profs trying to deal with larger class sizes. Taking a senior level graphics class with 30 people lets you write 4 gnarly opengl projects which the TA marks in depth; a software engineering course with 200 people, a weekly deliverable, and 5 TAs? Dividing that by 5 is more realistic.

(For context I go to a school not known for their undergrad CS program; experiences may differ in other institutions)

[Nullabillity]

> Most students are oversubscribed with four or five classes.

Perhaps that's part of your problem?

At the school I'm going to (KTH) you always[0] take exactly two courses at a time. That makes scheduling group assignments a lot easier. You also tend to take most classes with the same people, so once you've found a decent group you can stick with them for most project courses.

[0]: Almost, you're allowed to take an extra course if you ask nicely and have kept up with coursework so far

[jacobolus]

You don’t need to have a group of apathetic students in an organized course in order to learn via projects.

Lots of people have taught themselves to program (and many other subjects and skills) by doing their own individual projects.

[bluehat]

Yeah, but there is no denying that the external structure is helpful and the dedicated office hours can be a real lifesaver.