In which the Spider King is ranting because he’s in a really bad mood right now.
Or:
„Why I hate Group Assignments“
Or:
„Why I hate Group Assignments“
The professors at my university are really big on group assignments. I’ve had to write a paper together with other students or do a presentation together with them in every single one of my courses so far. The professors usually go on and on about how it fosters creativity, how you get better ideas if a couple of people work together and how it improves the relationships between students, but I found the opposite to be true. Lately my professors have also decided that online discussions are going to be part of our assignments. They thought it was a really awesome idea. Of course it also didn’t work out as planned in my opinion.
People are hesitant to take the first step and make suggestions. Nobody seems to want to take charge. So I usually end up telling my group members, „Let’s just write the essay about that, okay?“ because they don’t seem to be able to come up with anything. In one case I wrote the essay on my own because they weren’t doing anything, threw it at them and told them to at least add a few lines so that we could pretend it was a group essay.
Most of my fellow students seem to be perfectly happy waiting until shortly before the deadline so that they can get stressed out. We are usually given a few weeks to finish the essay, but nobody ever seems to want to start early. So while I sit back and relax because I’ve done my part, they are getting nervous. Maybe they are masochists?
Group work does not foster creativity. All those great brainstorming sessions that the professors talk about never really seem to happen. Most of the time those forced group discussions are kind of lackluster because – guess what – they are forced! I don’t know where the professors got the idea from that such things would challenge us. I have yet to see those inspiring discussions. It usually ends with me starting a discussion every other day because we are of course being judged as a group. So we either all pass or all fail the course.
Sometimes I have the feeling as if I’m the only person who actually wants to be there and wasn’t forced!
I occasionally enjoy working on something with one other person, but in my experience the essay usually just turns into a confusing mess if you have 5 or 6 people working on it.
Our professors also seem to think that things get done faster if you have a couple of people working on an essay together because each student only has to write a few pages, right? That’s what one professor told me when I asked her if I could just write the essay alone because I was completely fed up with group work at the time. „You won’t be able to handle the workload“.
I recently wrote a 20 page paper in a week, and I got an A on it. I needed a positive mark on that paper in order to be allowed to write my thesis, so I put some effort into it. The paper for the course in question was supposed to be a mere 10 pages, and it was a topic I was already very familiar with from my previous studies. We were given a few weeks to finish it. So I don’t understand where she got the idea from that it would be too much work. I work faster, more efficiently and have much better ideas when I’m allowed to work on my own.
In my experience having a couple of people working on the same thing inevitably leads to delays.
We are also supposed to write about our experience with the group assignments. I wonder, should I write about how much they suck and why and why I think they should limit all that group work somewhat? Would that be any good?
