I hate group projects.

[Newtonyd]

Kind of a rant, but I also want to know what you fellow students think of these things.

So I'm in College and me and 4 others get assigned a group project done as a PowerPoint presentation in front of the class. We divide up the sections between us, and I say that everyone's section should be about 4 minutes long, since we have 20 minutes as a team. Everyone agrees, we go about our work, meet up twice over a week and a half. I remind everyone that each of our sections should go about 4 minutes each. Everyone agrees.

Then comes the presentation day.

Our team goes last, so we're pressing up against the time when everyone is getting antsy to go. The first speaker (I'm 4th), is our 'team leader', and she decides she needs about 9 minutes to expound on her section of the project. 'Great', I think, 'now we'll either go overtime (into the period when class should have ended) or I'll just have to cut down my part.'

Then the next speaker goes up. As he begins to haltingly present his part, I realize he's probably going to go over too. At this point I begin to cut down the extra points of my part into more of the core concepts. But this guy, he's amazing.

He JUST. WON'T. STOP. Every time I think he's done, he pulls up another full slide of unnecessary exposition. Other team members whisper him, pleading with him to hurry but he just plods onward. It is FASCINATING how slow he is! He eats up about 14 minutes with his stuttering and umming.

Finally he finishes, the teacher decides he's had about enough and gives us a two minute warning. The third speaker tries to rush through her part of the presentation, but it's pretty obvious she threw too much onto the slides as well. So we run out of time without either of the last two speakers, including me, taking the stage.

Is it too much to ask to try out your presentation before hand and see how long it is? I practiced mine, and even made revisions and cuts so I could get as close as I could to 4 minutes.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I hate group projects!

How do you feel about them?

(Golly it feels good to rant!)

 

[Rednog]

I find group projects to be annoying less on the presentation side and more on the working together. People rarely have coinciding schedules and you always get the person who just can't make anything because they're soooo busy, when you know in reality they're just morons who have 2 hour sessions on facebook. Or you get the procrastinator who is always late or doesn't do their stuff on time. I also hate that because you could get screwed over by another person it somehow reflects poorly on you and your grade. I mean it's like come on, you're giving me the responsibility to somehow force this person to do the work, how am I in any way supposed to enforce it, it's not like I can knock on their door the night before the project is due and hold a shotgun to their head as they work.

 

[LiliumSnow]

I never liked group projects, even when I was young. I much prefer doing things on my own and working at my own pace. Not to mention in my Introduction to Ancient Romans class, I was in a group where we had to make a slide show presentation. But when the deadline was closing in, my entire group quit the damn course and I was left with nothing and had little to no time in rebuilding what I had lost. Fortunately the professor was kind enough to drop the presentation for me.

 

[Stall]

Did you not make your group rehearse your presentation? I honestly get that hunch, since people tend to go faster rather than slower in presentations when they're nervous, so the odds some someone's presentation time doubling and tripling between a rehearsal and the real thing are slim to none. That kind of timing isn't the other people's fault: it's the entire groups's fault for lacking the proper coordination and practice...

Stop blaming exclusively the other people -_-. It's your entire group's fault for not practicing the actual presentation as much as you should have. Man up and take responsibility.

 

[Soviet Steve]

Tends to be the opposite here. I get stuck with the dimwits who couldn't care less about what they were doing. Give them the simplest fucking tasks and they'll be whining that its too difficult 2 days AFTER they were due to deliver their work.

That is, if they bother showing up at all. I fucking hate this part of the country and I hate the youth that lives here. ARGH.

So in other news: Istvan's a mean old grump

 

[Jasper Jeffs]

I don't mind group presentations, I'm surprised to see someone take them as seriously as you do. I've always felt it's a burden to take interest because the students won't give a shit what's being said anyway. The only time I've been bothered by group work was a few years ago in college when we were told to make a 5 minute short film with a certain theme, ours was a Western. It was shit, awkward, and I was grouped with gimps. They tried to do it again later down the year but I skipped class for the week to avoid it. On my Uni course there's a lot of group work so I've got used to dealing with gimps, I just hate people that are fucking relentless. The last guy I got grouped with wanted me to meet him outside the Uni library and study at like 9 in the morning. I live at home and we were doing a presentation on Jean-Luc Godard, I can fucking Wikipedia that shit. Fucking hard workers, do they not know what slacking is?

 

[Moronical]

I find any form of group projects annoying and I hate them. It would be great if you are teamed with people who actually gives a damn and does the project with effort, but my last project involves being grouped with a couple of half assed twits and all of them doesn't speak proper English (Bad grammar and vocabulary. Worse then mine.)

The only reason I could think of why people give out group projects is probably to help out people who have absolutely no idea on what to do or help lazy idiots. Why work together when you could do the same project about twice as fast (most of the time)

 

[Lionsfan]

I've never like Group Projects, mostly because I always got stuck with people who never did it and we would all get punished for it. I mean there's been some fun stuff, like the time I spent all day working with this cutie on our project, but for the most part I prefer to do stuff on my own

 

[Newtonyd]

Did you not make your group rehearse your presentation? I honestly get that hunch, since people tend to go faster rather than slower in presentations when they're nervous, so the odds some someone's presentation time doubling and tripling between a rehearsal and the real thing are slim to none. That kind of timing isn't the other people's fault: it's the entire groups's fault for lacking the proper coordination and practice...

Stop blaming exclusively the other people -_-. It's your entire group's fault for not practicing the actual presentation as much as you should have. Man up and take responsibility.

Listen, there's a number of issues with rehearsing.

1. I'm not the leader.
2. They were told what was needed (4 minutes) and they all agreed.
3. Everyone has to schedule around work and school, we were lucky there was time to meet at all.
4. We had 9 days to do this project.

So no, it's not my fault. I'm not their mother. Moreover, for a project like this you don't need everyone to meet up. Coordination is hardly the issue when you just need a sequence of people to say their 4 minute sections. You just need people to know their 4 minutes (they said they all did). Is it my fault that my teammates were liars?

 

[Bat Vader]

I can't stand group projects. When I was in 10th grade I had to do a group project with three other people and none of them did the work they agreed to do. I ended up having to do their work for them. I did let the teacher know what happened and I was able to get an A on the project while the other 3 people failed.

 

[viranimus]

I personally find them to be proof as to why X > ME.

There is entirely too much focus on "group work"and all it is really doing is releasing a group of people unfit to accomplish tasks on their own out into the world. In an educational context, it is just plain lazy educating.

You need to train the individual to be able to handle all the work themselves. That way you have no need to work in groups, however, when you DO work in groups, the output of a group of properly trained people will always be greater than the output of a group of people who rely on group structure. The only thing you really gain from focusing on group work is if you need to have those within your group conform to one standard, such as a military operation. However how often in work, social, and other environments is that actually practical?

 

[Hero in a half shell]

Kind of a rant, but I also want to know what you fellow students think of these things.

I've had worse, believe me,

Group projects are usually hit and miss, I had two great guys on my course who we did all our group projects together, for the full four years, they were really dedicated and it was great, but I also had a few horror stories.

1. A woman doing our course (mature student) really had the gift of the gab, and knew the subject, which was good, but she just couldn't do time limits. She was the first speaker in a five person 20 minute presentation we had to do, so that's four minutes each...and she alone spoke for 25 minutes. We could have strangled her, Just standing helpless in the sidelines as she talked

2. A guy on exactly same class as the first, but a different presentation, was in charge of designing a landmark building to be placed in a seaside harbour town, the average height of buildings at the waterfront was around 5 stories, so we told him to design a taller building, around 7 or 8 stories, to stand out as an important new landmark. He used a 3D modeling programme, (sketchup) and delivered something literally about 50 stories high, absolutely ridiculous and out of place, but he only brought the screenshots to us, on the day of the presentation, so there was no time to change the building size. Believe me, you may have thought you did poorly on that presentation, but at least one of the lecturers didn't openly swear when he saw your proposals, cause ours did!

3. We were in a group of four, us three and another guy, who was determined to do as little work as possible. At one point we were in the library prepared to work straight until it shut at 11p.m., he left us at 3p.m. to "go to the studio" and we got a phonecall from a classmate 20 minutes later asking if we were working, because he had spent 5 minutes in the studio chatting, and left to go to the pub. We also had to spend a day redoing all his work before we put it into the document because it was crap, just a series of copy pasted notes.

Try and find a couple of hard-working guys that you get on with, and if possible, always do your groupwork with them.

 

[chaosyoshimage]

In high school group projects went one of three ways, I did all the work, I did no work, or I was working with my best friend.

 

[WolfThomas]

I hated it in highschool I remember I actually did the bulk of an assignment but got a lesser grade than another team member because he did his personal part of it better. It freakin' infuriated me.

In Univesrity it hasn't been too bad, I'm studying medicine, so people either do their share of the work competently or do far more than they need voluntarily leaving you feeling bad at your contribution.

 

[Jodah]

I hate group projects. My main issue is that I don't want random jackass XYZ to be a determining factor in my grade in the class.

I did have one good one though. For one of my CJ courses we had to argue against another team on a topic of our choice. I chose media violence on the side that it had no impact on real life violence. We broke it into music, movies/tv, and video games. I got video games. Our group absolutely demolished the other team.

The professor even complimented me about my portion being in depth and appearing natural speaking in public. I hate public speaking as much as the next guy but I don't freak out doing it, which is good since I'm going to be a lawyer...

 

[Newtonyd]

1. A woman doing our course (mature student) really had the gift of the gab, and knew the subject, which was good, but she just couldn't do time limits. She was the first speaker in a five person 20 minute presentation we had to do, so that's four minutes each...and she alone spoke for 25 minutes. We could have strangled her, Just standing helpless in the sidelines as she talked

Try and find a couple of hard-working guys that you get on with, and if possible, always do your groupwork with them.

Ouch, that's absolutely crazy.

And my groups are always chosen by my professors, usually at random. Often I end up being the leader / speaker, but in this case it was 3 women to 2 men, and everyone else ended up listening to her.

I suppose I might have seen this coming, but it was still such a pain to see my work go to rot. Will have to talk to the professor.

 

[Dags90]

Sounds like you failed by not working as a group. You clearly missed the point of the assignment.

This isn't an after school special, I'm sure most of the assignment is the content. By college "playing nice with others" should be a given. At least, it should be. Pretty sure if you can't by then, there's a good chance you won't ever.

I've had some good and bad luck with lab partners, though I regularly dread figuring out where to sit on the first day of lab if I don't see anyone I know isn't a bit slow.

 

[Roxas1359]

I don't like group projects myself. I usually end up doing all the work myself, or I do my part and get my grade lowered because my partner didn't pull their weight. When I'm with my friends though we get the job done, however I'm usually assigned to a group. Also, whenever I get a project to where my partner(s) is know to be absent or they "forgot to do it" I do their part of the project just in case. Most of the time I will work by myself, which I know isn't a good social skill at all, but because of my experiences with groups I tend to prefer them. I've been blessed this year though in my Physics class this year though because I've got 2 more partners that help me with the work, and only one that doesn't even pay attention. Now, to hope that my partners did their parts of our project due tomorrow on tge Norse Poetic Edda.