The objective of a schooling system is to educate its students in a variety of different subjects, the most obvious being math, science, history, and English. However, children are also sent to school to learn how to communicate and work well with others, skills necessary throughout all stages of life. It would seem that group projects, by requiring several students to collectively accomplish a task, are an ideal tool to introduce such talents. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Public schools mesh together students with a variety of different backgrounds, personalities, and capacities for learning and understanding new information. As such, it is inevitable that certain students will take on different roles in a group. Given a task to complete, an outgoing and conscientious personality type might take the lead while another student hesitates to speak up and a careless or unconcerned individual neglects to offer any substantial input at all. When the project is completed, however, all students receive the same grade. A system is fundamentally flawed when it assigns identical rewards for non-identical merit. And yet, this appears to be the philosophy underlying many group projects.
Some would argue that group projects in school reflect real-world scenarios, but there is one defining quality that separates the two. In a work environment, employees earn different salaries. The amount of money earned is determined by each individual’s position, hours, productivity, and many other factors. An employee that contributes less time and effort compared to a coworker will often earn less. If that employee neglects to work at a level that meets the requirements of an occupation, he or she will be fired.
While students do not earn money for their work in school, they do receive grades. At the high school level, every grade factors into each student’s GPA, and by extension his or her probability of getting into certain colleges and successfully entering the workforce. I struggle to understand the justification for giving students with incredibly different skill sets and expectations for themselves the same grade for a joint project in which they clearly did not participate equally. Every student has different standards. While one person might be content to turn in a typo-filled group project, another who strives for perfection must spend hours making corrections while also struggling to avoid offending the original author.
I do not propose eliminating group projects entirely. Students must learn to work respectfully together in a school environment. Instead, we should give participants in group projects grades that correspond to the work that they completed. For example, students that write the paper for a project should be given better grades than those who simply color the poster. Perhaps this can be ascertained through evaluation forms completed by each group participant upon completion of the project. I also propose that teachers be lenient of situations in which the weak links of a group negatively impact the perception of the other members. No student should have to independently complete a workload meant for four because the other members of the group either fail to work at an acceptable level or refuse to participate entirely.