Group work can work, but it needs a different setting. I studied at an university where half of the time was group work and it worked because:
The students had 100% authority over how groups are formed, i.e. number of groups and who are in which group. The teachers had nothing to say in this.
The result is that:
1) it quickly became common knowledge who the slackers were (and who were the opposite).
2) nobody wanted to have the slackers in their group, so they were kind of ostracized and had to make their own group. They often ended up with the bad marks they deserve.
3) everybody learned that you had to do your homework/groupwork if you wanted to be part of a good group. It became a lot more difficult to get away with lame excuses for not having done what you promised. People really worked hard.
3b) If a group member didn't do their work, the other members could exclude the person from the group, and that person then had to make a project on their own, which is really really difficult. Again, the teachers had nothing to say in this, they could not veto an exclusion.
4) you ended up with a notion that your reputation had important consequences, just like in real life. Introverted people who did great work were popular group members.
5) Bonus: you learned to value different skills in people. Instead of wanting to be around people exactly like yourself, you learned that people who are (and think) different are very valuable for good projects.
I had a similar experience once in high school. After a first round where the top four students were assigned to a group of the lower end ("You'll be a good role model", he said, which failed miserably) we then picked our own groups for the next project. He went down the class, in order of grades, and had us sit at a group table. So the student with the highest grade in the class sat as a table of their choosing, followed by the second, then third, etc.
My group had 3 of the top 5, and one who was somewhere just above the middle. The three of us had flagged her over to be the fourth member.
The reason for this? She didn't have the highest grade, but we knew she worked hard (it was a somewhat unfair consequence that we learned everyone's standing in this way; we assumed she'd have been higher)
It didn't matter. We divided tasks, made sure everything was covered, and all got As.
The lesson out of all of this was, in group work, having the smartest or best test scores didn't matter as between four of us, we could work it out together. But having people who could do the work did. And that is more valuable in a team.
These days, I work in a group of eight managing engineering and operations for a specific technology. We have some who are crazy smart but don't do much, and a few others who are pretty new to the tech but work pretty diligently. The former talks alot but has few deliverables, but the latter, while asking us a lot about the higher end stuff, has taken it upon himself to clean up little inconsistencies and chasing down the non-serious, but obscure errors in our system.
You have to be careful not to play favorites, but we try hard to make sure the latter guy knows his work is valuable and that he's appreciated.
I had a similar situation when I was a manager, had one guy who couldn't code for shit, literally took this guy 2 or 3x longer to implement a feature from scratch, than anyone else on the team. He could trouble shoot, debug, and interact with support like no other. Got on a lot of goto meetings with customers that I didn't want to. I tried to steer him toward a support role, but when it came time to cut people, I needed coders, and had to let him go. That's my biggest regret, and part of why I never want to manage again.
Did the support roles pay as well as development? Usually they don't, and the chances of a meaningful promotion are less than in development. I wouldn't be surprised if he stayed in development because it paid better and had better career prospects.
I think this is a fairly dangerous setup. Having studied a hybrid of business administration and CS I think that people were labeled "slackers" way too quickly when it came to programming group work. It's genuinely hard to learn programming for some people which I didn't really appreciate before university. In fact some people are morbidly afraid of it (just like math) and just give up at some point. Since I was already interested in it way before I started university the curse of knowledge was in full effect for me.
We tried to get "slackers" involved whenever possible and took it as a sign of failure on our part if we couldn't. This was equally true for true slackers (there's inevitably people that will be lazy and try to cruise). Confronting them and giving them well structured work packages kind of works (and was really hard for me). It's a very good preparation for the workplace. I'm most certainly an introvert and I think people who try to cruise and get by without doing much work are usually extroverts. This is observational evidence, I could be completely wrong but you have to be somewhat good at making up excuses on the spot and talking to people and overwhelming them if you are a "slacking pro".
I think the main point is that there's a difference between slackers and people who don't care. You can slack but still care about the group work, but you can also slack and not do anything at all. In the former, slackers may feel compelled to work harder when working in a group (like the ones you're talking about), but in the latter they just don't care enough (like the ones who ignore emails).
I think it's important to give group members some level of control over the group and not require a group to carry someone who isn't contributing. Some of my professors gave us the option to fire group members who weren't pulling their weight. Oddly enough, with those professors I never had a bad group. :)
We never had to do it, but knowing the option was there was always nice. I think it helps motivate some people, too; no one wants to be person fired from a group and have to complete the entire assignment on your own.
One of my roommates in a different group DID have to fire a group member. It's been a long time since my college days and I'm trying to remember, but as I recall he said the process went something like this:
1. The group as a whole had to go to the professor in unanimous agreement that an individual wasn't pulling their weight.
2. The professor confronted the individual in question privately to ascertain if there was a legitimate reason. In this case, I'm guessing there wasn't one. He was apparently given a warning to start showing up to group meetings and contributing.
3. Apparently it got better for a few weeks but the person in question started slacking off again. So the group went back to the professor again. This time the professor informed the slacker that he was no longer in the group and would have now complete the assignment on his own.
IIRC the person dropped the class shortly thereafter.
There are certain failure modes that that doesn't work for.
I had a group project once where none of the other three members really did much at all, not because they were lazy but just because they weren't very competent (seriously, I spent like five hours with a member who was a software engineering major trying to help her write a few lines of C that would run on a microcontroller on the board that I designed. In the end, I just wrote all the code... I wanted to help them learn, but the amount of background knowledge they didn't have just made it impossible in the time we had).
When it came to peer assessment, the way it was done was that the person being assessed would go outside, and the rest of the group assessed them and come up with a single rating. So you couldn't mark them down much really because everyone else knew that they had all done the same amount of work as that person... So we all got the highest grade in the end (not that I would have crucified them or anything though, since they were fairly willing to try).
In your case, I think you handled it as well as possible. At least your fellow group members were willing to try and be involved, even if they weren't technically proficient enough to complete the required work.
The whole firing group members, IIRC, was meant to handle people who weren't contributing and weren't even trying to contribute. Basically, those hoping to ride the coattails without expending any effort. It's an iterative improvement over the standard group model, but by no means was it perfect.
Honestly, I don't think it's possible to design a perfect group work system. There will always be human edge cases.
That sounds like it definitely works in the university setting you're describing, and sounds like the same type of thing that would have happened in the middle school setting I used to work in. The unfortunate thing in both settings is that the slackers always get bad marks.
This is especially bad for a 7th grader when poor school performance can have little to do with the student's actual skills and a lot to do with their home life and/or parental involvement.
I don't think you could possibly design a mixed-skill education model where slackers don't get bad marks. If slackers get good marks, marks are meaningless.
I guess I was more commenting about the fact that is doesn't matter whether the groups are self-formed or teacher-formed, or university-level or middle school-level because the outcome will always be the same: slackers get bad marks.
One of my goals as a teacher was to identify "slacker" students who didn't like to read and then try to help them find enjoyment from reading. Usually the reason for not liking reading was that they hadn't found a subject or genre that they connected with or were allowed to explore in depth.
That is kind of off-topic, but I always felt like the marks were only one aspect of education and even if the student ended up with bad marks, they could still grow and be a different person by the time they were done with the school year.
> I guess I was more commenting about the fact that is doesn't matter whether the groups are self-formed or teacher-formed, or university-level or middle school-level because the outcome will always be the same: slackers get bad marks.
Actually, that's not true in my experience. When a teacher assigns groups, then they often force slackers into groups with hard-working over achievers who pick up all the slack. So the slacker does get a good mark.
Not that I think that's a good thing for everyone. It pisses off the student who did all the hard work, makes marks meaningless, and allows the slacker to coast further without learning anything.
Goes the other way as well. My cousin had horrible marks on her SATs. 800s. Yet she was straight A's in classes. As a music major she was playing in two bands in addition to her AP course work.
The college didn't seem to mind. UNC gave her a full ride. Well deserved.
You hit the nail on the head; these early marks are meaningless. These are barely mentally formed children. We do everything we can to avoid having them be responsible for their choices because honestly they aren't ready to make serious decisions. Except we begin the gauntlet of constant rating and judgement in school with aftereffects that carry over throughout their academic lives no matter their circumstances. Their success or failure is essentially a proxy for their parents success or failure, or a accident of circumstance more often than it's any genuine ability.
If any marking is to count or mean anything it needs to begin when they are adults capable of making real choices.
The slackers need a wake-up call. Most of the slackers slack precisely because they can get away with it.
You don't learn to stop slacking by always being able to get away with it, still getting good marks even though you didn't do any work.
I was a slacker in one subject in high school, didn't do homework at all. The first mark I got was an F-. It was the kick in the butt I needed for pulling myself together and do the work needed to raise the grade step by step to a B+.
The problem is in the complexity of the problems solved at a University and a k-12 level. I think this is brilliant but it assumes that there is varied work to be accomplished by all members. Most of my projects in HS where all easy enough that it was difficult to say that more then one person was needed. Slackers could survive off their friends and the people who would get everything done on their own and then let the rest of the group copy.
My high school LA teacher decided to adopt the same system.
Popularity contest ensued.
The interesting thing is that those who were one of the more intellectual types staunchly rejected the hierarchy, and formed a ragtag group with the leftover slackers.
The students had 100% authority over how groups are formed, i.e. number of groups and who are in which group. The teachers had nothing to say in this.
The result is that:
1) it quickly became common knowledge who the slackers were (and who were the opposite).
2) nobody wanted to have the slackers in their group, so they were kind of ostracized and had to make their own group. They often ended up with the bad marks they deserve.
3) everybody learned that you had to do your homework/groupwork if you wanted to be part of a good group. It became a lot more difficult to get away with lame excuses for not having done what you promised. People really worked hard.
3b) If a group member didn't do their work, the other members could exclude the person from the group, and that person then had to make a project on their own, which is really really difficult. Again, the teachers had nothing to say in this, they could not veto an exclusion.
4) you ended up with a notion that your reputation had important consequences, just like in real life. Introverted people who did great work were popular group members.
5) Bonus: you learned to value different skills in people. Instead of wanting to be around people exactly like yourself, you learned that people who are (and think) different are very valuable for good projects.