Working in Groups

Sail

The worst part of working in a group is having to depend on other people. I just "completed" a project for English where each group had to create a radio broadcast from the 1920s. On Saturday I sat at my computer for ten hours straight while members of my group filtered in and out of my house to record their parts. I edited the entire thing myself and even wrote brand new section to make up for the people who fell short with the one group member who stayed behind to help me.

The reason for this is because three members of the group have been studying nonstop for the Chemistry AP test and had to leave to attend a study session. Two members were on the verge of what turned into a break-up and were fairly eager to get away from eachother. So this leaves me and one other member to stress over how the group didn't follow the rubric and how to make up for it. But, then again, this sort of stuff always happens to me. Whenever I'm in a group project it's always stressful, I always pick up the slack, and I always get blamed by the group members when I can't carry the weight.

The above situation wouldn't be nearly as bad if these were people I didn't know. But unfortunately it isn't so, and it just so happens that they're all very good friends of mine. I don't blame them really for dropping the ball on their parts, because they're all very studious people who are extremely concerned over how they do on the AP exam. But because they wanted the content to be A quality instead of the C-B quality that it is, they wanted me to do more research and recordings tonight to fill in the gaps. And I've been through this exact situation, sadly, enough times to know that tomorrow at least one person is going to be upset with me because I didn't.

Working in groups just brings out the worst in all of us.

[Edit] If you want to hear the product of my labor, it's here. If you're wondering what's wrong with it, it's that it's missing several sections required by the rubric.

Andrew

On a lighter note, I got an A in Chinese.

/Shameless braggart

Double Z

Groups tend to suck most of the times. Specially when the biggest slacker is me, and it is me picking up the slack.

Oh and I'm building a god damned robot.

/Even more shameless.

Videos tomorrow.

Viga

Dude I have a story. That comment you made about working is strangers isn't as bad. I worked with my two buds on a group animation project. One was good and lazy, one was slacking and I tried hard but had trouble learning somethings. It all resulted in the last day rush during art hell week. The following semester I got to work alone. Ahh...

Working in groups isn't always bad. I have good stories too. It just depends on who's in it.

Boy Blue

I generally agree with the strangers bit too, I'd work harder just to set a good impression I guess... I do tend to leave everything last minute (group work or alone), but when actually asked/ bugged to do something I'd finish my part fast enough. However unlike you guys I can't say I'm the type that picks up the slack for an entire group.

Apreche

In school when you are forced to work in a group, don't work with your friends. Get together with the hardest working straight A bookworm kids in the class. In CS classes I would always try to get into groups with the serious grad students. It always paid off. I already know that Rym will offer different, but equally valid advice.

kumarhk

I remember a couple of years ago, we had about four group projects at school. I just found four reliable guys to group up with, and we each did one subject. Obviously, this won't work if it's audio, but if it's a written report or presentation, this a great way to do it, trust me.

HMTKSteve

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Kilarney

A school group project results in the smart kids being pulled down and the dumb kids getting an inflated grade. I suppose it's important to teach kids how to work in a group, but there ought to be better ways.

lackofcheese

Well, like I said in a different thread, one possible strategy is for the groupings to be chosen based on grades.

At uni, I had one course that was, in its entirety, a group project, and the grouping was based on GPA.

Jay

I'm fairly cynical about group work. I got screwed over allot with groups in high school, all the smart kids new each other from a young age and always made the same groups so I was left with the...others. To make it worse, I went to what I later found out to be the 10th worst ranked school in all of Ontario. There wasn't even middle ground kids in my classes. It pretty much went A students to people that didn't care with no in between. With the A being a very small minority. I treated group projects as if they were solo projects throughout high school. My Dad is a teacher and a social worker, he put the last nail into the coffin of hate for me with this. "At younger ages you should assign group work to children to teach them how to work with others. But teachers are not stupid. They know group work can screw over people and it does allot. You shouldn't assign group projects with significant grades to people a year or two before they go to university, especially when you know a large part of your class is dumb. Group work at later years doesn't teach people to work together they should have learned that before, its just teachers being lazy." (this is paraphrased of course, he said this a long time ago and I'm pretty sure there was more cursing)

Rochelle

I don't like working in groups, period. I wouldn't say I really had any bad experiences, but I don't like depending on other people when it comes to something that will affect my grade or my work.

It sucks when it turns out your friends are the ones that are causing you stress and putting pressure on you to take care of most of the work, however if you can still stay friends with them that's cool.

At work, when they ask about projects or group work, they always seem to look at me or ask me to lead or participate. I respectfully decline. I know better. I wouldn't want to work with most of the people here because I know I'll pretty much be doing all the work and get no credit for it.

thaneofcawdor

I had to work in a group of four people for my final year project at university. Only two of us knew each other. We worked long hours for over nine months, had to give numerous presentations, verbal reports, attended countless progress meetings, and had to submit many working documents, each typically over 50 pages long. After all this, we gave a comprehensive half-hour presentation to our sponsor, lecturer and our peers. And in the end, we scored the highest possible grade (High Distinction - 85% or higher). So, in short, I'm awesome.

cosmicenema

I'm not sure this will make anyone here feel better but I think it generally gets better once you're in the workplace. People tend to follow more of those semi-formal social rules even when they're working with freinds. This isn't to say it's always smooth sailing, but as a rule the level of accountability goes up.

HMTKSteve

I'm not sure this will make anyone here feel better but I think it generally gets better once you're in the workplace. People tend to follow more of those semi-formal social rules even when they're working with freinds. This isn't to say it's always smooth sailing, but as a rule the level of accountability goes up.

Yes, when your paycheck is on the the line people tend to perform better.

TheWhaleShark

I'm not sure this will make anyone here feel better but I think it generally gets better once you're in the workplace. People tend to follow more of those semi-formal social rules even when they're working with freinds. This isn't to say it's always smooth sailing, but as a rule the level of accountability goes up.

Depends on your field. Scientists, despite the collaborative nature of the field, can be some of the least cooperative and productive people you will ever meet.

Johannes Uglyfred II

Auuugh, I'm having groups problems right now in my Public Relations class. We have to put together a campaign book for the student newspaper (our client), and Jesus shit! I like these people, but they have no idea how to write bullet points or even make sure they use information from our primary research accurately. Our slides look like goddamned shit, and I have to fix it. :x

Dkong

In school when you are forced to work in a group, don't work with your friends. Get together with the hardest working straight A bookworm kids in the class. In CS classes I would always try to get into groups with the serious grad students. It always paid off. I already know that Rym will offer different, but equally valid advice.

What if you're friends with the straight A bookworm kids? :P

Anyways, I don't mind group projects. A 12 page research paper is a lot easier with 4 people than just by yourself, that's for damn sure. For most of my school projects, my teachers want individual sections labeled with who did what, so if someone royally fucks up, it doesn't hurt anyone but themself (and the group grade slightly). If my teachers don't make us put down what sections we did, and someone slacks off, I usually mention it to the teacher so their effort fucks themself and not the whole group.

gomidog

I was just thinking of this incident this morning about my Japanese final, sophomore year. We had to write and perform a play in a group of 3-4 people, and the teacher tried to balance out the groups by putting kids who did well in with kids who had trouble. I got paired with this punk-ass slacker and a large, nerdy kid with crippling social anxiety issues. We were going to split the writing up, and I finished my part in a few days. The next week drop-out dude handed me a stained, crumpled piece of paper with a few scrawled lines of dialogue. Nerd did not bring in anything. "That's it?" I thought, and had to write the whole thing by myself at the last minute. Since I hurried, and used the weekend I was supposed to go home for to write the paper, we would have time to memorize it. The nerd kept demanding plot elements, like godzilla monsters and stuff like that, but I made it all work. I memorized it, tried to get the kids to practice and they assured me they would. However, the day of the oral exam came and when we stood up there to perform the play, the nerdy kid got terrible stage fright and started whimpering and stuttering and forgot all his lines and slacker just stood there with a dopey smirk on his face and not a word to say. I ended up playing all the parts by myself and when it was all over, I bitched out slacker for his laziness and tried to calm down nerdy kid. I was livid. This happens all the time when I do group projects. I hate having other people screw up my hard work.

Apreche

There's an easy solution for when you get stuck in a group with people who don't do anything. Do all the work yourself. However, when it comes time to actually hand it in, don't give them any credit. Don't put their names on anything that is handed in. Don't let them stand up during any presentation. If they try to, call them out in front of everyone. I saw it happen to another group once. They had a guy in their group who didn't do anything, not even like come to class. When it came time to do the deed, they didn't let him stand up there with him. I assume he must have felt pretty bad sitting there all dejected.

kage_rod

I don't know many people in my classes so I tend to get put into some random group by the teacher or I just ask the nearest group. There's so many times I had to lead everything, and it sucks because whenever I hear that we're working in groups that day, I always get bitchy and a huge headache because I know what's going to happen. So I end up sitting there with the list of questions. I'd read out the first question, then look up and see them, if they're actually paying attention, simply staring at me dumbly, so I'd have to pick on them until they say something, even for the easiest questions.

What scares me is that I'm in English 20-1 - the higher level of grade 11 English - and yet no one knows anything. I can only imagine the English 20-2 or, worse, English 23.

If I can, I'll do group projects myself or, when you -have- to be in a group and I know beforehand, I just skip. I'm sure my teacher knows, but I have good grades and don't cause many problems, so I think I'm fine.

Unfortunately, there's been tons of times where it's not even in school that I have to do group projects. For scouting, we had to do a presentation for some Chief Honor table thing or something. My friends - there's only the three of us in our little Venturer group - had been going to these meetings every Saturday and had to present it for Baden Powell's birthday a couple weeks from when they told me about it. I never got to go to those meetings because of work, so it didn't actually concern me, but they didn't know how to do it. I decided to help, so I set it up so they did research and script, then recorded their parts at home so I can put it all together in a video. I ended up sitting them down and working on the bloody thing for five hours, fixing up the script, filling in research holes, and having them record with my mic on my computer, all on my one day off in which I wanted to clean and do other things. It pissed me off so hardcore.

@Uglyfred - Haha. Jesus shit.

ProfPangloss

I'm not entirely sure if this would could as "working in a group," but the logistics still apply. A while ago, I took a playwriting class with a bunch of other homeschoolers, many of whom I had known for years.
For the first few weeks of the course, we were writing a one scene two character play, and we picked two of our classmates to act out the parts while the writers directed their respective plays. It was a fun course overall, but choosing someone who had a pretty bad crush on me (let's call her "Christie) proved not to be the smartest decision. Our rehearsals were uncommon, to say the least, and I found that my actors didn't memorize any more of their lines. Also, "Christie" was so afraid of my being upset with her that she continually assured me that she could do it, while not showing any progress whatsoever.

When the day of the performance arrived, I met with my actors upstairs to do one last run-through, only to find that "Christie" had trouble remembering her first line, let alone the other 12 pages of the piece. I know she didn't have a learning disability, since she did well with her other studies, without any "special needs" help. Perhaps it was the pressure of having me direct the piece, or maybe she was just lazy. Whatever the reason, she didn't know the piece. If that wasn't bad enough, she refused to read straight from the script, while assuring me that she could memorize the piece in the 15 minutes we had before the performance (probably just because she didn't want me to think poorly of her.) After much consoling, involving a brief point where she ran out of the building and refused to come back in (five minutes before she had to go on), she finally agreed to just read the script onstage. The performance went fairly well in the end, but it wasn't worth the headache.

I ended up taking the same course the following year, and I had some other issues with my actors being jackasses to each other, not doing anything during rehearsal, and having trouble memorizing lines. One of them also had to read the script on stage, once I rushed it to him. At least he showed effort and progress throughout the course, though. *sigh*

Kate Monster

In school when you are forced to work in a group, don't work with your friends. Get together with the hardest working straight A bookworm kids in the class.

Those were my firends.

There's an easy solution for when you get stuck in a group with people who don't do anything. Do all the work yourself. However, when it comes time to actually hand it in, don't give them any credit. Don't put their names on anything that is handed in. Don't let them stand up during any presentation. If they try to, call them out in front of everyone. I saw it happen to another group once. They had a guy in their group who didn't do anything, not even like come to class. When it came time to do the deed, they didn't let him stand up there with him. I assume he must have felt pretty bad sitting there all dejected.

In my second semester in college this happened to me. In a six person group, three of us did all the work (and it was a semester long project that counted for our entire grade). After the first few weeks of class, it was clear the other three would not be participating. I met with the other two that wanted to work, and I told them that I would be the bitch (I am so very good at it) and discussed the matter with the professor. I proposed that we keep a weekly journal of what we did for the project and when we created a table of contents to the "book" we put on who contributed what. In the last two weeks of the class, the three non-contributors tried to meet up with us to put together the presentation. We informed them that the project and the presentation were complete, and the fact that they did not show up to out bi-weekly meetings for the entire semester had nullified any contribution they might want to put into the project last minute. They attempted to put together their own presentation and book in two weeks, but two of them plagiarized and ended up being kicked out of school for it. The third person simply failed and re-took the class the following year.
Let this be a lesson to any lazy-bones out there. There are hardcore bitches like me that will kick you in the pa-toot if you try and screw them over.

Lyddi

This semester I had so many problems with group projects. For one of my cs classes we had a semester long project that counted for a big chuck of our grade. Me, a friend and one of his friends paired together for our project. It went along ok for awhile. Then we get these annoying emails from this kid saying, "I wasn't in class the week we did teams, the prof says I'm on your team." So he shows up for our 1st meeting, says a bunch of dumb stuff about the project (dumb ideas we didn't want to use) and does his part of the write-ups. The project was spilt into 4 parts, and this was the 1st one. Then he disappears off the face of the Earth. The TA said he never dropped the class, but he never came to class. He also showed up for the midterm, and that was it. However, he didn't respond to my many emails (I was the group leader so I was responsible for making people do stuff). I sent him emails for like 2 months, to more than one address, and he never responded. By then my group and the TA assumed he wouldn't show up at all, and he never did. I was told he failed miserably, hah.

In addition to that, my friend was a total procrastinator in the group. I like procrastinating myself, but you must know its limits. One of the parts of the project required making a prototype of our product and we had like 3 weeks to do it. My friend really wanted to do it, so I said he could, and me and the other girl did the other stuff. I swear I emailed him every day asking how far he was, and up until the last weekend, he had never started. My part depended on the prototype being finished, so I really needed him to be done with it so I could do my part. I even talked to him on the phone for half an hour explaining how important it was to do it. I offered to just do it myself, but nooooo he wanted to. And because he was my friend, I said ok. The night before it was due, he still hadn't finished. I did half of my part the best I could, and hoped he would have it done before I woke up (It was due at noon the next day.) However, I had an eye infection and couldn't wear my contacts, so I had to wake up early and go find a place that could make me instant glasses. I have terrible vision so I really needed them. He didn't have his part finished before I left in the morning, so I was just like,"Wow, I dunno what to do." So I went to get the glasses, and hoped I would be back at school before noon. Of course it took longer than I expected, so I wouldn't be back in time. I then called him and told him to send me the freaking "almost" finished prototype. Then I went to a Starbucks and finished my part and emailed it to the other girl so she could turn it in. That was such a stressful morning, all because he procrastinated so bad. (And he never finished it either).

We didn't do very well on that part. Anyway, I guess avoiding being in a group with your friends is a good thing. I have no problem being mean to a non-friend when they are slacking. But then again its so hard to get strangers to meet together and cooperate. Sigh.

jcc

The worst part of working in a group is having to depend on other people. I just "completed" a project for English where each group had to create a radio broadcast from the 1920s. On Saturday I sat at my computer for ten hours straight while members of my group filtered in and out of my house to record their parts. I edited the entire thing myself and even wrote brand new section to make up for the people who fell short with the one group member who stayed behind to help me.

The reason for this is because three members of the group have been studying nonstop for the Chemistry AP test and had to leave to attend a study session. Two members were on the verge of what turned into a break-up and were fairly eager to get away from eachother.

The above situation wouldn't be nearly as bad if these were people I didn't know. But unfortunately it isn't so, and it just so happens that they're all very good friends of mine.

That doesn't sound like the behavior of very good friends to me. Very good friends do their best to make sure nobody gets shafted, even when things get rough. It sounds like the behavior of long-term acquaintances, honestly. People who are familiar enough with one another to no longer be interested in making a good impression, but not close enough to want to keep things square & even when it gets inconvenient for them.

Apreche

The best group I was ever in was ad-hoc networking class my final year at RIT. I was with one guy I had worked with previously, and two smart grad students. We were all totally cool, and all worked really hard. I think we all got As in the class.

Anyway, we decided to make a clone of Combat! with ad-hoc networking. This wasn't the kind of thing you could procrastinate on, as the project itself was the entire class. You had to get up and give progress reports pretty much every week, and people would see if you made no progress.

So the very first week I implemented multiplayer combat in Java all on my own. I didn't add the ad-hoc networking part, but I wasn't about to do the entire project in just one week. When we showed up to the first progress report with a working game, that blew everyone else out of the water. It also meant that for the rest of the class, I had it pretty easy as far as workload was concerned.

Kate Monster

Being a Theatre Major, almost all my projects were group projects. Since I double majored in the Acting and Directing Track and the Tech. and Design Track, I had a firm grasp on all aspects, took my classes seriously (a rarity for many theatre students) and I was always happy to work harder for a better product, so I was usually was the group leader. The best group project I eve had was in my puppetry class, and we had a Bunraku project. It takes several people to control one puppet, and very precise and graceful movements, so it took a lot of work. Luckily, my group members were all really excited to make it perfect (in every aspect including puppet construction, music, staging, lighting, choreography, and execution). It was so successful that we were invited to perform for the Senator Schumer when he visited the campus!!!

Sail

In school when you are forced to work in a group, don't work with your friends. Get together with the hardest working straight A bookworm kids in the class.

Thoseweremy firends.

Same goes for me.

That doesn't sound like the behavior of very good friends to me.

Oh, they all apologized profusely. But honestly, the AP Chem test is really a lot more important than one English assignment.

By the way, we got a 95 out of a possible 100 points.