Group Projects: The Good, The Bad, and The Messed Up

When you hear the term ‘group project,’ what do you think of? A long term project with tons of requirements? A slide show? Posters? Researching a certain topic for hours upon hours until your brain hurts?

With Online School, many kids are choosing to not do their work or just ‘do it later.’ In reality, this creates a broken partnership between that member and their group mates.

There have always been kids that never do their part in their project, do the bare minimum, or even take all of the easier and more enjoyable tasks.

In the end, online school or not, most projects will have little to no effort put into them and one person will end up doing all of the work.

This is not fair for the person/people that put in the effort while the others that were being idle got the same grade for their nonexistent efforts.

Q: “With online school, how do you think this affects doing group projects? Or how does it compare to in-person learning?”

“Most groupmates I’ve been with already slack off, and we were even in person. So, I don’t think it will change much except that a few people that normally don’t slack off, would forget about it until the last day.”

– Shaun Wright, junior

“Considering each groupmate’s wifi probably won’t be the best, it could affect the projects and whatnot.”

-Gregory Blemur, junior

“Teachers can look and see what effort each partner is doing in their project. Speaking from my personal experience, I feel as though each person should be graded on their efforts instead of both getting the same grade when somebody else did all of the work.”

-Annabel Squire, junior

“This might sound bad, but I’ll admit that I sometimes slack off on projects. I’m getting a lot better. It honestly just depends on you and your partners. Personally, you work better with people you know than total strangers.”

-Chisom Olisa, junior

Some people love the thought of a group project, while others get scared. And well, some don’t care at all.