| I'm currently studying a CS(-ish) bachelors degree (and I'm currently procrastinating on a group assignment) so I have some experience with this. Our uni gives us quite a lot of group assignments. The university-wide solution to this problem is to include a mandatory section in each group assignment, where we are supposed describe the specific contributions of individual groupmembers. This is a neat idea in theory, but it doesn't really work. Because we've almost always lied in this section. You'd think that the more productive student would want to claim their own work, but more often we've prioritized 'sticking together', and aimed for distributing the described workload as evenly as possible. The idea being that the highest grade wouldn't be higher anyway (the report doesn't magically become better), but it might give the grader incentive to give some group members a lower grade. It's not a zero-sum game. So we might as well sacrifice some pride to keep the group dynamic strong, and to help out weaker students (regardless of whether it's a work-ethic or an intelligence problem). That being said - we might be an unusual social group. We generally prioritize technical (and social) abilities way higher than grades (which aren't so important here anyway). We've all stuck together since the start of our studies, despite being a very wide span of academic ability - so theres a lot of teaching and learning within the group. A survey of our uni recently ranked our line of study #1 for "How motivating the social life is to performing academically". So it seems that our approach is working. EDIT:
I should mention that it's by no means the case that the actual workloads are distributed evenly. They are of course very skewed, and often a single group member will do almost no work. |
Just a thought.