Grade socialism

I loathe group projects.

I have long suspected that group work is an attempt to distribute grades more evenly -- propping up the grades of the poorest students and even depressing the grades of the most accomplished students. It constitutes a sort of a curve, but one entirely unrelated to student performance. This impression was cemented in my mind when, in a class in which modest effort earned me a high A on every exam, I made a low C on a group project, having slaved away in order to compensate for total apathy and incompetence on the part of several group members. They got the same sad grade I did, but for all I know, it kept them from failing (which at least one of them should have done).

When I feel even less charitable, I view group work as a form of tutoring on the cheap -- or even as an implicit admission of professorial inadequacy. Perhaps this is because the professors who assign me the most group work seem to be, with a few exceptions, my least competent instructors. "Here," they say, "I don't seem to be making much sense. Let's see if you can figure this out by talking amongst yourselves. But I still get the paycheck."

Do some students learn well by working in groups? Of course. Sometimes I do myself. But I have never found it a very efficient method. Most of my group projects involve two or three times as much work as other methods would for the same grade and learning payoff. I admit that this will vary with the individual, but I have never heard anyone hail group work as efficient. In the very best of times, the amount of time and energy wasted in coordinating team members is ridiculous, and dedicated group members almost always have to compensate for slackers besides.

But this is preparation for the real world, I hear you say. When I grow up, I will have to work on group projects all the time.

Well, I think there are certain aspects of the "real world" that need reform -- including a pernicious managerial culture that encourages hypocrisy, mediocrity, freeloading, and empty gestures. In this artificial commercial reality we have constructed, pretty PowerPoint files and manufactured camraderie are worth more than ingenuity and meaningful communication. Let's conspire to resist it, and let's begin with a commitment to grades that mean something.

I am complaining because of a little group project I have to turn in tomorrow in my French class.

This assignment is as follows: For the oral portion of the final exam, we students were supposed to form groups of three. In these groups, we were to write dialogues in French. We were supposed to memorize these dialogues and recite them in class (that's what happens tomorrow).

Indulge me if I suggest that this scheme has certain flaws. First, it tests our ability to write and memorize, not our ability to form sentences on our feet, defeating the purpose of an oral exam. More to the point of this post, however, it forces us to memorize each other's work. As I discovered today, that means memorizing some impressive illiteracies -- just before I take my written final. In other words, thanks to this group project, I have to study bad French.

Perhaps I could have corrected my team members' work, you say, so that I would not have to memorize their errors. Ah, but that would only be possible if I had seen my team members' work before this afternoon. One team member missed at least three deadlines; I spent the weekend trying to track down a document that was supposed to be in my inbox on Thursday. (Furthermore, my correcting their work would tend to compromise the value of the exercise as a gauge of individual learning, would it not?)

Yes, I am procrastinating. I now have just 17 hours left before class.

| Posted by Wilson at 18:40 Central | TrackBack
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