[floriannn]

Ugh, group projects in college were just the worst even before AI. In the real work environment, if someone doesn't show up, doesn't do any work, or is just not good at their job, they can be fired. In college group projects they just drag everyone else down and either people do their work for them or others get a bad grade.

[Gibbon1]

My school all the labs were group projects. So it's not one project it's all of them. Guy in our group didn't do any work at all. Just up and refused.

He thought he thought he could get away with that because it was his last semester and he had been accepted into the masters program at Stanford. We talked to the professor and the professor kicked him out of the class.

[danielfoster]

I always felt this way, too. In university I would just go to the professor and tell them person XYZ is being fired from the group.

[nothercastle]

You never worked for a large corp? The standard for getting anything done is how many groups with of work statement can you do without their assistance. Usually if it’s less than 3 your project is dead

[atmavatar]

Bonus: one time I was paired with someone who didn't do any of the work, and they somehow managed to get a better grade on the project than I did.

[Waterluvian]

Sadly that sounds exactly like some workplaces.

[kjkjadksj]

You can always rat them out to the prof

[Prcmaker]

Which, in my experience, almost never has any impact on anything.

[speff]

Aligns with my experience as well. Way back when I got my MSEE, there was a guy in the group that did literally no work towards the final project. Tried asking the prof for help, but crickets. Turn-in time comes around for the report and we leave the guy's name off of it. I get heavily peer and prof pressured to put his name back on after some sob story comes out. Got some pretty valuable takeaways from that class and none of it was related to the course material.

[thehoff]

Not sure if others did this but when I did group projects (25ish years ago) we did the project and submitted or presented as a group. But at the end we also submitted to the professor (anonymously) “grades and comments” for others on our team.

[Loughla]

Working with other people is an important skill to learn. That's why they do that.

If someone isn't carrying their weight in college, you rat them out to the professor. If the professor won't do anything, you go to the department head. It's not high school. You don't have to try be cool anymore. You're there to learn skills for your life, not worry about whether or not the thump dick that isn't doing the work will like you or not.

[danaris]

Designing group assignments that don't penalize people for having shitty group members is not really that hard.

Either you design the assignment so that each person is responsible for a different segment of it, and then they bring it together at the end, or you require each group member to provide some kind of nontrivial write-up of their own contributions, and what they learned, as part of it.

Ultimately, the key is never to grade individuals in the group based on anyone's performance but their own. Otherwise it's just another form of collective punishment, which is pretty damn unethical.

[nothercastle]

Professor doesn’t care it’s easier to grade a group assignment