Group projects serve as an important lesson to students to prepare them for the rest of their working lives. That lesson is that you can never, and should never, rely on any of your working peers for support and that you’ll—more than likely—end up doing their work for them. After all, isn’t that the biggest takeaway that everyone has from these experiences? Sure, it’s not like you’ll ever hear about or remember the time that you had a group that worked perfectly together, but you’ll always remember that group where you had to do the entire thing. So, maybe it’s a bias of our memories that jades our perception of group projects so considerably, earning them their infamy in online rhetoric.
This student shared her experience of being saddled with an entire group of useless members, five whole other people who couldn’t be bothered even to read her messages attempting to organize the group. It was only after she gave up and turned the project in herself that they could even be bothered to message her, hounding her about updates on the project that she had, unbeknownst to them, already submitted. This resulted in these members not getting credit for the project, causing all but one to fail the course.
See her story as she shared it online below, along with select reactions from the original thread.
