At Germantown Academy and many other schools, group projects are required in some classes. The purpose of a group project is straight and simple: they are used to get a student prepared for adulthood by having them work with a variety of different people and interact with them.
Group projects hurt rather than help a student’s learning and do not display a student’s academic abilities.
One reason is that a student might be paired up with someone who is more academically talented than they are and use that to their advantage by not doing work and submitting their partner’s work as their own, which is considered plagiarism by some teachers.
One group member doing all the work is not beneficial for learning because the person who did not do any work at all did not learn anything that they were supposed to learn and they showed no evidence of learning the topic, which comes back to haunt them when that exam comes up. They could struggle and possibly fail.
Secondly,if one group member cheats, every member of the group has to suffer. If one member of the group uses AI and chooses not to learn the project, the entire group has to pay the price by all visiting the Honor Council. As a group, everyone is responsible for each other, and it’s one for all and all for one.
Lastly, if one group member decides to not pull their weight, it reflects on the group, and the group members who have done their part are impacted.
In some classes, the teacher picks the groups and in other classes students pick the group they want to work in.
The disadvantage of students choosing who they want to work with is that everyone decides to go work with their friends, which causes problems, one of them being that they might not get any work done because all they do with friends is goof off and hang out and forget about the assignment.
The second problem is that if there is an odd number of people and there is one person left over, the person left over will not have a group and needs the teacher to help them find a group, which can get awkward at times.
Although group work is currently negative, there are ways that can help make group projects a more positive education experience.
One way that can be used to improve group projects is to ask students their preferences for who they would and would not want to work with, and ask them this question every month. This is so people can choose who they do and don’t want to work with, but the teacher still makes the groups.
Another way that group projects can be improved so that the work is fair is that the group has to fill out a planning sheet saying who does what, so that if the work isn’t completed or AI is used, the teacher knows which student did it and doesn’t punish the whole group.
Although group projects are good for learning, I believe that we can make a few changes to make them even beneficial for learning and set students up for success when they get to the real world.