A colleague of mine described a method for assigning groups that I'd never considered, but that she says worked surprisingly well. On the first day of class, s

A colleague of mine described a method for assigning groups that I'd never considered, but that she says worked surprisingly well. On the first day of class, she gave out a survey, and one question was "How many hours do you expect to spend working on this class each week?" She assigned students to groups who gave similar answers. The self-described hard workers were delighted to be together, and the folks who were hoping to coast pretty quickly realized that nobody else in their group was going to just take over and do it all, so they reluctantly buckled down, too.