My favorite was in grad school -- six weeks into a final project, the professor emailed us "we noticed one of your assigned group member's name was missing from the project mid-term report". We were all like huh? What 5th group member? This person was assigned to our random group at week 0 and had never bother to even introduce himself in five weeks! Free rider galore.
It was a 13 week class and the person minimally contributed by just showing up to meetings such that you couldn't say "he didn't show up." We had to do some D3js visualizations and one time he even sent a photo shreenshot of a chart rather than actual code to embed onto our project site.
One time he gave us a hard time about not being able to meet at any point except his lunch-hour. So we're all on Eastern Time at 3pm during the workday and he's on zoom...eating a sandwich as we spoke. So we gave up, we didnt even include him on any conversations because it was negative value.
In speaking with other students, 5-10% of the graduating class were complete free riders. Some were sponsored (e.g., federal government employees, etc) and were not only free-riders in terms of work, but also in terms of cost. Further, when graded your team got graded based on how many people you had, which many of us spoke up against especially given randomly assigned groups.
That said, some of my randomly assigned teammates were awesome, we're still friends, we formed great bonds and I wouldnt want to miss that experience.
One of the most fair way to handle group projects grading was in my capstone business management course. At the end, the 6 of us each had to (privately) rank everyone else according to their contribution, and the assessment by your peers was 20% of the grade for the project.
Because someone had to come in last place, it eased a lot of the tension and created a much more pleasant group dynamic:
- The free-rider(s) were perfectly okay with jumping on the grenade, filling the last-place spot, and knocking 20% off their final grade in exchange for doing very little work and still passing the class.
- The lazier people who did care about their grade were a bit more motivated to contribute than they otherwise would've been.
- The go-getters who wanted to ace the class felt like they were fairly compensated for doing most of the heavy lifting.
We had a fairly similar grading program in my IT capstone project. The professor made it clear that if a group had either a total grifter or was an all-star team exceptions could be made. We had to give lots of presentations and question and answer sessions. It was generally pretty clear to the entire class which students were slackers and couldn't answer questions and which ones knew their stuff.
This is a large reason behind why I switched to programming after receiving a bachelors in media arts. I’ve had bad experiences with people claiming work they didn’t do, and getting away with it because they knew people.
