It’s 10 p.m. Another busy day is coming to a close, but before you can settle down to relax, you need to do one last thing. Your group project, which counts for a chunk of your grade, is due by midnight. You’ve done your part, but there’s something not sitting right with you. You go to open the document to make sure everything is in order, but then you notice it: someone hasn’t done their part. In a panicked frenzy, you scramble to do all their work before the fast-approaching deadline. 

What I just described is a scene familiar to many of us. Group projects are the bane of students’ existence, but many instructors love to hold them on a pedestal. There is much intrinsic value in group work, as sharing work responsibilities with others is a necessary tool for professional development. However, when handled inappropriately, group projects tend to foster stress and cynicism more than effective teamwork.

What makes group projects a behemoth task is the very thing they intend to promote — working with other people. From navigating everyone’s schedules to delegating tasks, group work is  hard to manage, especially for a college student who has enough on their plate as is. Furthermore, individuals coming into a group project bring their own unique approaches, which can be a good or bad thing.

Although there is usually no issue when placed among reliable students, situations like these aren’t always guaranteed. In most group projects, there is usually at least one person who does a majority of the work. Most of the time, it’s not because of individual choice, but because not everyone contributes to the project equally. For anyone who has held this dreadful position, it can be easy to harbor negative feelings toward group work.

There is a scientific explanation for this phenomenon — social loafing. According to this idea, individuals participating in group activities tend to put in less effort than they would alone. Social loafing particularly affects groups with high achievers, as they are often the ones expected to pick up the slack. 

Even when work is divided evenly among the group, these projects typically involve little collaboration. In a majority of my experiences, everyone goes their separate ways once delegated a task, sometimes asking questions when help is needed. When this happens, it’s not a group project anymore but working alone with other people.

It’s important for instructors to assign better group assignments so students can derive the most benefit from their collaborative experiences. While creating a group project that effectively ensures both individual accountability and collaboration is challenging — it’s not impossible.

One way instructors can rebuild students’ trust in cooperative assignments is to require them to log their individual progress as well as the group’s. This way, students are able to keep track of what they completed, and the instructor can ensure everyone is staying on track. 

Because there’s a chance for students to lie about the amount of work they completed, instructors should also require peer evaluations. This gives everyone in the group the opportunity to rank or rate one another in terms of their contributions. While peer evaluations typically happen after an assignment is finished, having students complete one earlier can help them identify where they need to improve.

Group projects that account for much of a student’s overall grade are not the only ways to promote collaboration. Small team building exercises can be incorporated into everyday classroom activities. For instance, one assignment for my English 101 class involved working with the people at my table to create a fake news article. This low pressure assignment instilled the same benefits of a larger scale group project without all the stress.

Whether you love to hate them or hate to love them, group work is not going away anytime soon. In order to alleviate some of the resentment, professors must adjust the way they approach these assignments. Only then will students be able to reap the full benefits of collaborative activities.