I'm not saying that group projects are always a bad thing. In her particular class - debate - it's a necessary thing. Your method addresses something that is a deep concern of my kids' - people taking credit for their work. I didn't ever care about that myself. I always thought - 'Hey, you can give everyone in the class an A for all I care, but I wanna have learnt something at the end of it.'
My daughter can handle the feeble attempts at bullying - in fact, she's not at all upset by it. She's kinduva a big girl - and by her attitude and size the other kids assumed she was a senior. They were a bit surprised to find out she was only a freshman. I'm more indignant at the thought that these are the popular kids and they might easily get more nasty. OTOH, things seemed to have calmed down considerably.
In the past when I have worked on group projects, it always seems there are only a few people who do all the work. In my last college course, there were two group projects. In the first I did all the work - which I didn't mind. Everyone got As - which I didn't mind. However, I had to go down twice a week to meet with the 'team' and these guys screwed around the whole time - and never one time did anything they said they would do. I was intensely irritated. Two of the group already knew java - I had to teach myself (course requirement which I ignored). It would have made much more sense for one of them to help design the project. This was a huge chunk of time outta the week and it nearly kilt me. For second class, I told prof, "Look, you can fail me if you want, but I'm doing the next project by myself." "But it's way to too much work for one person," he said. I'm doing all the work anyway, I said. Harder project and less work, because I didn't waste hours of every week explaining stuff to people who were perfectly capable and perfectly unwilling to do anything. It wasn't all THAT bad - one girl was very smart, worked hard, but couldn't program (no idea why they made her take a graduate course in operating systems). But the other two had no excuse.
If there are N people, I never expect everyone to do 1/N amount of work. But I do expect everyone to work hard to make some contribution. In this project, I did the design, I did the implementation, I set up the test cases, I did the analyses, I wrote the final report. Ironically, the girl who didn't know very much was the biggest help. I could actually talk things through with her. She'd come up with some vague idea I'd shoot down. This was most helpful with the homework problems. God were they hard. Every week - ten problems. On average, each problem would take about 30 minutes just to understand it - and some of them twice that. When I'd call her on Mondays, she'd have put considerable effort into nearly every problem. On several problems I think her approach was better or more thorough than my own. Considering her lack of background, this feat impressed me. Contrast this with the goof-offs who had very good experience going into the course. First, they knew java (for the programming part). Second, they were still in graduate school, so a lot of things were still fresh in their minds and they had all the basic stuff outta the way. When I called them, they had generally not even attempted the problems. It was a one-way braindump. Again, I don't mind this if it didn't take time. As I don't care about anyone else's grades, I would have been happy to fax my homework to them, but the requirement was to discuss the stuff which would take a coupla hours a week (in addition to the projects).
I learned more in the course than any other I've ever taken. It was also the hardest course I've ever taken. But it didn't have to be so painful. And it wouldn't have been had I not been stuck with goof offs. Now I could have settled for just doing a fair portion of the work and turning in a non-working a project - or not doing the research part or no paper. But I was determined to get an A no matter what. Whether anyone else got an A or F, whether they got what they deserved or anything like that is not my concern.
This was not my first experience with group work. It was my last, though, and it was also the absolute worst.
k
