Group work does not inherently benefit everyone involved. The disadvantages of group work include conflicting expectations, unequal participation, productivity paranoia and organizational challenges. Each of these disadvantages can lead to an overall bad experience for those involved as well as the possibility of failure.
One of the biggest challenges within a group structure is decision-making. Collective decision-making can take a long time, and decisions made by groups are usually held to a higher standard than individual decisions because they tend to draw varying perspectives and additional information. Due to the need to explore these varying perspectives, decisions take a lot of time to make. Recalcitrant peers make group work far more difficult than it ever needs to be.
Unequal workload is another one of the issues seen within a group. There’s always someone in every group who is not participating, someone who is spearheading the whole project, someone who is goofing around and distracting others, and most frustratingly, someone who is unreachable.
I know from several personal experiences that group work hardly ever goes according to the professor’s plan. I’ve been in groups where nobody cared to contribute but wanted full credit. I have also been in groups where groupmates do not show up until the day the assignment is due and attempt to present knowing absolutely nothing about our assignment. I’ve even had people change the entirety of our assignments the night before presenting them, leaving the entire group confused and frustrated.
Another reason why I dislike group assignments is because sometimes these groups aren’t randomly assigned, and one or more group mates are forced to become a tutor for the others within the group. Professors sometimes organize groups deliberately so that some students are forced to “help out” people who are struggling.
I appreciate some of the merits of group work and collaboration — the sharing of thoughts, the solidifying of ideas, the changing of minds and the social aspect for those who lean toward extroversion, etc. However, groups tend to waste time talking about irrelevant topics and teaching others how to do their part.. The entire organization aspect of group work is suboptimal, as typically one person takes over and decides who does what.
Part of the issue is that a lot of group projects are not designed to be group projects — they’re really just individual projects that people are allowed to do in a group because it means less content to be graded.
The main issue is that you end up with a group project that to achieve its goals pretty much requires everyone to participate in every part. This results in either horrible patchwork papers when students try to make a clean split anyway, or results in the strongest/most motivated student leading the work while others are either doing supportive tasks, going through the motions of doing the project while what they do gets superseded by the strongest student, or just slacking off entirely. A good group project requires a task that lends itself to specialization and division of tasks. It’s not something that can be applied to projects where students need to learn everything in the project.
