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Rant: Groupwork

Malakaiii
edited February 2007 in General
I reeeeally despise being forced to do groupwork in university. It really is a ridiculous format for teaching and learning! Sadly, they use it a lot in first year courses and since I'm taking 2 minors and trying to get into PDP (which has lots of varied requirements), I'm in a lot of first year courses...

The stupidity of groupwork:
- having to teach your group members
- having groupmembers not understanding the work, and confusing others
- trying to organize the work evenly
- dealing with slackers
- dealing with overachievers
- arranging meeting times outside of class (hard to do with different schedules!)
- being stuck with keeners who want to do hours and hours of work for a project worth a very small percent of the final grade
- having to work with people you don't know
- your grade depending on the work (or lack thereof) of others
- people not comprehending that you are taking FOUR OTHER COURSES and really you don't give a crap about the assignment that's worth 10%...

Oh and I'm also tired of dealing with tons of emails from these people all at the LAST minute trying to arrange things when I'd written them weeks before with no response.

Really, the amount of time we have to put in just to deal with everyone makes it an absolute joke.

pissedoff.gif

Comments

  • noname
    edited February 2007
    I'm on the opposite extreme. I had an excellent experience with group work at the university level. Sadly, I had two opportunities to do group work (my first project consisted of a group of 6 members and my last project consisted of a group of 11 members) only and both times my group managed to obtain the top mark in the class. The thing is, during both of these experience, everyone in my groups got along with each other and people actually wanted to meet up. We even went out to have dinner together many times after working on the project late. Maybe I just got lucky and the prof put me into a group of good people.
  • Messiah
    edited February 2007
    There's really no need for group work at the stage of the education process. It's important in grade school and high school, but by the time we're in University it's really just very pointless. Just give me the essay, I'll do it myself and be done with it. I don't want to have to run every parahraph through six people so we all make sure we're not quoting from the same article.
  • imelting
    edited February 2007
    i believe group work in business classes are vital, same for engineers

    not so for other faculties
  • Malakaiii
    edited February 2007
    The ones I'm specifically complaining about are group projects for Linguistics and Kinesiology.

    The Linguistics group wants to make the project overcomplicated, and the Kinesiology group hasn't even started the freaking project yet because they can't get their shit together...

    Meanwhile, I could've been done BOTH projects and not have to think about them anymore!
  • Pixie
    edited February 2007
    Group projects are silly. I never liked them because: 1-I don't trust other ppl(cause usually most of them like to slack off), 2-I don't get along with ppl >.<

    Hope that your projects will turn out good.
    Good luck!

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