@Miller,
I'm not disagreeing with you here.
One thing I hated was a study group. In journalism classes we used to get assigned to at least three during two semesters of work. The idea was to get used to the idea of cooperative researching so that, like in TIME magazine, your name would be put in the byline of an article as "...contributed in the reporting of the story."
The problem was the 80/20 rule works really well for study groups. Eighty percent of the work is done by twenty percent of the people. Some people were notorious for literally doing NO work. Assigned to discover say, the origin of the idea of an HMO for an article on the changes in healthcare, they would show up at the student lounge or this really great bar/cafe called the Library (more on that latter) saying they weren't able to find anything about HMOs.
And they would shrug.
After this happened twice in the first semester, two friends of mine and I told the professor that we had to be assigned to a group together. We did the research, we attended the meetings of the group of eight (several people never ever showed up), we wrote the articles and turned them in with everyone's name attached but ....three or four had an asterisk next to theirs.
We never indicated what the asterisks meant, the non-contributing students never objected and I, at least, never heard a comment from the professor about them.
Joe(give me individual research anytime.)Nation
@Joe Nation,
They probably didn't object to the asteriks because they never read what you wrote and therefore never noticed.
but you are right -in most group project stuff - there is usually just a small portion that does the work.
@raprap,
others don't and suffer if the thing is graded on a curve.
