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I think it's important to give group members some level of control over the group and not require a group to carry someone who isn't contributing. Some of my pr

by peckrob 11y ago

I think it's important to give group members some level of control over the group and not require a group to carry someone who isn't contributing. Some of my professors gave us the option to fire group members who weren't pulling their weight. Oddly enough, with those professors I never had a bad group. :) We never had to do it, but knowing the option was there was always nice. I think it helps motivate some people, too; no one wants to be person fired from a group and have to complete the entire assignment on your own. One of my roommates in a different group DID have to fire a group member. It's been a long time since my college days and I'm trying to remember, but as I recall he said the process went something like this: 1. The group as a whole had to go to the professor in unanimous agreement that an individual wasn't pulling their weight. 2. The professor confronted the individual in question privately to ascertain if there was a legitimate reason. In this case, I'm guessing there wasn't one. He was apparently given a warning to start showing up to group meetings and contributing. 3. Apparently it got better for a few weeks but the person in question started slacking off again. So the group went back to the professor again. This time the professor informed the slacker that he was no longer in the group and would have now complete the assignment on his own. IIRC the person dropped the class shortly thereafter.

stephen_g 11y ago
There are certain failure modes that that doesn't work for. I had a group project once where none of the other three members really did much at all, not because they were lazy but just because they weren't very competent (seriously, I spent like five hours with a member who was a software engineering major trying to help her write a few lines of C that would run on a microcontroller on the board that I designed. In the end, I just wrote all the code... I wanted to help them learn, but the amount of background knowledge they didn't have just made it impossible in the time we had). When it came to peer assessment, the way it was done was that the person being assessed would go outside, and the rest of the group assessed them and come up with a single rating. So you couldn't mark them down much really because everyone else knew that they had all done the same amount of work as that person... So we all got the highest grade in the end (not that I would have crucified them or anything though, since they were fairly willing to try).
- peckrob 11y ago
  In your case, I think you handled it as well as possible. At least your fellow group members were willing to try and be involved, even if they weren't technically proficient enough to complete the required work. The whole firing group members, IIRC, was meant to handle people who weren't contributing and weren't even trying to contribute. Basically, those hoping to ride the coattails without expending any effort. It's an iterative improvement over the standard group model, but by no means was it perfect. Honestly, I don't think it's possible to design a perfect group work system. There will always be human edge cases.

by peckrob 11y ago

stephen_g 11y ago

There are certain failure modes that that doesn't work for. I had a group project once where none of the other three members really did much at all, not because they were lazy but just because they weren't very competent (seriously, I spent like five hours with a member who was a software engineering major trying to help her write a few lines of C that would run on a microcontroller on the board that I designed. In the end, I just wrote all the code... I wanted to help them learn, but the amount of background knowledge they didn't have just made it impossible in the time we had). When it came to peer assessment, the way it was done was that the person being assessed would go outside, and the rest of the group assessed them and come up with a single rating. So you couldn't mark them down much really because everyone else knew that they had all done the same amount of work as that person... So we all got the highest grade in the end (not that I would have crucified them or anything though, since they were fairly willing to try).

peckrob 11y ago
In your case, I think you handled it as well as possible. At least your fellow group members were willing to try and be involved, even if they weren't technically proficient enough to complete the required work. The whole firing group members, IIRC, was meant to handle people who weren't contributing and weren't even trying to contribute. Basically, those hoping to ride the coattails without expending any effort. It's an iterative improvement over the standard group model, but by no means was it perfect. Honestly, I don't think it's possible to design a perfect group work system. There will always be human edge cases.