[plake]

I never understood why some colleges set group work, it seems like such an obviously terrible way to evaluate people. Good students will end up doing all the work, and if you try to change that, the good students will lie about it to appease you.

You can just set individual projects, it's not that hard.

[msg3]

Putting students into groups reduces the marking load by the number of students in the group. I teach a course with >100 students - grading 25 reports is manageable, where as grading 100 is not.

There are some good pedagogic reasons for group work too - most people do end up working with others, so getting some practice makes sense.

[jerf]

I have never in my career been set into a group of people with semi-random distributions of skill in the relevant task, totally unknown to me at the outset, with no management structure either in place, or available, where we are all nominally peers responsible for equal portions of the task, with the knowledge that the group has no future and its only deliverable (ultimately) is a grade.

The resulting experiences were not all that helpful.

I've worked in almost every conceivable structure since then; with people more skilled than me in some things, less skilled in some things, above me in the org chart, below me, way off to the side, in other companies entirely, in small groups, in large groups, startups, established corporations, heterogeneous skills and fairly homogeneous (as much so as it ever gets, of course). In all those situations, I would have to say for all their pathologies and successes, none of them have ever even slightly resembled my college experience with "group work".

In engineering we are not in the habit of taking 4 people fresh from a job interview, putting them all in a cubicle, providing them no distinction amoungst themselves in responsibility, and handing them a collective task. Any manager worth their salt would take one look at such a "management" structure and instantly tell you how there's virtually no chance of success there. It is so obviously flawed that I really don't see the point of doing it for the purpose of "working in groups". I don't know if "working in groups" is even possible to really test for in the college situation, but it certainly is going to take more work than drawing names from a hat and calling it a day.

I can't think of a way to avoid the fact that there's no way to resolve conflicts because the situation is just too darned symmetric. I don't even mean acrimonious conflicts necessarily, but any difference of opinion no matter how emotional or not. It's not even about simple "authority"; in a real work environment, someone may be the one who is going to own the support, or has years of experience with the relevant systems, or may be junior in other ways but has a ton of experience in this particular thing... in the real world there's almost always some way to resolve these things long before it gets to any sort of real conflict. These artificial groups don't have anything, though. They're set up to explode in exactly the way that so many of us, including me, experienced.

The only symmetry-breaker is "who cares most about the grade" and the totally rational game-theoretic solution is "let them do the work then". What else is there in the general case?

[wussboy]

It's almost like working with other people is important, and the ability to do so is probably the strongest indicator of future success.

That doesn't mean the way universities are doing it is good or productive, but the solution is to fix the way universities are doing it, not to abandon the need to figure out how to work with other people.

[diminoten]

Are you evaluating people or are you evaluating people's ability to work in groups?

Very rarely/almost never in a career in software will you be allowed to go off and do "your own thing", and if that opportunity arises, decline strongly. Don't be "the guy in the room".

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-ten-commandments-of-egoles...