By Frankie VanSickle, Staff Writer
Group projects have always been a big topic in classes at the college level. Why do we always have them or why am I having to be in the group that no one does anything in projects?
Personally, I hate group projects. I find them to be the worst, because I always feel like I am doing all the work every single time. Last semester, I had a group presentation that was my final, and I was always the one that contacted them, because if I hadn’t, I would have failed the class.
Professors always seem to think that group presentations or group projects will work. If your friends with the people in your group then it works perfectly, but if you aren’t, then you are taking a risk for your grade which is awful because you are trying so hard to do well in your classes.
Professors always love to say this will be helpful when you get into the workforce because you are going to be exposed to different types of people every day.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree that group projects are a good way for different types of people to interact, but I think there could be a better way of doing this.
Last semester, I had a professor use Microsoft Teams for our group projects so to speak.
At the beginning of the semester, he gave us groups and that’s who we got to know throughout the semester. When he put us into our group, he would be able to see what we were talking about in our groups even during class when we have discussions to do for participation.
I thought this was the best idea for projects with groups. With COVID-19 happening for more than a year now, it was the best possible way. We couldn’t sit next to each other to talk to each other or get to know each other, so he found another way.
It was also a great thing for the professor as well to gauge where we were at with the projects and if we understood the material. If we needed help with the assignment, then he would either message us in the chat or come up to us in our class and see if we needed help – which most of the time was yes because it was a hard subject.
I thought this was a perfect system for group projects. I made more friends, had a collaborative effort of our grades, and actually had fun with the project which sometimes that’s a hard thing to do. We need to be able to look at things like group projects and see what’s not working for kids if they are getting bad grades or having a hard time seeing other people’s differences when they are just randomly put into groups.
There are so many ways to do group projects that will benefit the student and the professors, they just need to find that way.
vansicfr18@bonaventure.edu
