“Now get into groups…”
Those dreaded words seem to fall so innocently from the lips of Professor So-and-So who does not realize (or perhaps does realize and is one of those teachers who takes joy in torturing students) that those words will potentially wreck a student’s life forever and ever and ever.
Frankly put: group projects are the worst. And when I say the worst, I mean THE worst. There is no way around it.
Everyone seems to be doing “all the work” and everyone’s group members are lazy, stupid, non-dedicated — or, even better, the stuck-up, know-it-all, who opposes every idea you propose, makes you feel like an idiot for asking the most essential questions, and who, in the end, proves to be right in all of his or her assertions just making him or her that much more loathsome. No one is ever satisfied with the group they were assigned to or the group that they may have been so unfortunately forced to choose. There has never been a group that has successfully and without bodily harm projected (Is that even a verb? Forgive me, it is the time in the year when I start making up words because I am too “busy” aka too lazy to look up a more sophisticated word) together.
Truly, whether your group members are knowledgeable about your subject or whether they are nothing more than a warty toad snoozing on the log of academic life, you hate them. I hate them. I hate them for you and for me. I hate them for the people. I hate my group members in whatever group project I have. Perhaps therein lies the problem: I start my project already hating my group.
There is one exception to my experience thus far with group projects and that was my freshman year biology lab group. Our motley crew was composed of three different grades, three different ethnicities, and varying levels of loathing for our teacher. We forsook traditional learning, adopted nicknames for ourselves, waded blindly through our key experiment and ended up all getting straight A’s because the lab teacher was a floundering post-grad without a clear lesson plan and, therefore, without a clear grade book. That is the one time in my life that I have very literally praised Him for an incompetent teacher.
On the whole, though, group projects seem to be designed to create divides. Polarize the student body, they say. Make them hate each other, they say. Let them emerge on the other side embittered to the core, they say.
Friends, group projects are inevitable. Whether you major in communications, philosophy, creative writing, some brand of science or even the oh-so-ambiguous liberal arts, you will be forced into a group of two or more. You will be obliged to work together, late nights, sometimes. You will need to produce a finished project or presentation of some kind. And you will be graded on each others’ work. In the interest of sanity-preservation as well as in the spirit of an attempt at student unity, I offer you these points called “The GPE”: Group Project Etiquette. I had originally titled this “Do These Things So I Do Not Come at You With a Knife in the Middle of the Night” but it was too long and, frankly, most of my ex-group members don’t deserve the honor of being threatened in such a way by me. I digress.
- Respond to emails/texts/Snapchats/whatever from your group members promptly. Within 24 hours at the most.
- Put as much work into the project as you would if it were a solo project and your grade were resting solely on your efforts.
- Bring snacks for your group members. This will increase yay vibes and decrease nay Preferably popcorn and dark chocolate, but that’s just me.
All in all, be a basically good human to your fellow group project members. One last thing: do NOT message your group member who has put in twice the amount of work as you have at 11 p.m. the night before the project is due with “questions about paragraph 2” or “I think we need to format all fifteen graphs differently” or even (my favorite) “Can someone explain to me what exactly my part is about?” This is all a #truestory in case you were wondering. I lost years off my life that night.
Let us promote unity and love and all that nice squishy stuff in these otherwise onerous projects. Teachers will never stop assigning them, but we can at least nom on some freshly popped corn while we attempt to not kill each other. We may never speak to each other after the group project, but let us at least put forth our best effort (and I do mean best effort — not last minute, half-hearted, letting-other-members-carry-me effort). We may still despise group projects even if the above Group Project Etiquette is implemented, but we may at least confirm that we are better, smarter and work harder than anyone in our class.
And that is affirming. Probably not true, but affirming.
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Follow Taylor Nam on Twitter: @nam_nam330
