Group Project Problems

This past week has been extremely demanding, especially with an engineering group project on top of the normal work load. On a weekly basis, a group of three to four students presents a research topic of their choice to the class, keeping with the assignment titled: “How Stuff Works.” Each group presents on the technical aspects of whatever device or “thing” they choose. My group decided to research computer hard drives and will be presenting our project this Thursday. We chose this topic since it is straight forward and there is a lot of information on the Internet concerning hard drives.

I have had experience in group projects going back to elementary school, and especially in middle and high school. (Fairfax County is big on projects, and many teachers think group projects are valuable.) From my experience, however, group projects are unfair to the students who care about their grades. I have leadership experience from scouting and school clubs, and understand planning, organization, and delegating tasks between members of a group, or following another leader and being an active and valuable group participant. But with school group projects, it most always seems that one or two people end up doing all of the work because at least one individual ends up contributing nothing. I thought that this would be different in college, especially since people who may not typically care would have probably been weeded out through the application process. I was wrong.

My engineering group consists of three people, and I am extremely disappointed and frustrated with one member. I am surprised that this individual got into Virginia Tech or in any college for that matter. It is known that he cannot grasp even the simplest concepts in class, but I thought that a group project that involved research would be an opportunity and he would appreciate working on something non-mathematical or theoretical with hopes of bringing up his grade. Unfortunately, he either does not know how to research or create a PowerPoint presentation, or he does not care to contribute and only wants to benefit from what the other two of us do.

The funny thing about this individual is he desperately wants people to think he is knowledgeable. In class, he corrects people all the time, even though he is usually incorrect himself. On the first Engineering test, known to be a ‘weed-out’ course for engineering students, he mentioned to me that he had gotten a grade in the 40th percent range. I did feel badly for him when I heard that because I am working very hard and know that some grades do end up being lower than the effort put into the class, but I am seeing more and more that he is both dense and not putting forth any real effort. For instance, on the first day of class in our assigned groups, each group was told to build a tower out of straws and paperclips and to go for an efficient structural design. Each group had certain materials and quantities that were available to us, which placed limitations on our design, and our goal was to make the most efficient design possible out of what we had. (Our group was going to go for height, using the least amount of materials). We decided that a pyramid structure would be an excellent base, since pyramids are very sturdy and can support a taller structure. This individual wanted to build a second pyramid to put on top of the first to make it even more structurally sound, which is a good idea, except he had already forgotten our limitation on supplies. Yet, for some reason, even after we pointed out the lack of supplies, he had to be right and kept insisting that we should build a second pyramid structure to put on top of the first. This wasted a lot of time and was very annoying, so we finally let him try to build his second pyramid. His attempt failed of course (he wanted to sneak and get extra material!), so we stopped him and spent five minutes trying to convince him that using any more material would be cheating and would also defeat the purpose of the assignment. He just never seemed to get it, and these sorts of struggles continue to impede any group progress.

Fortunately, the other member of my group is reliable and knows what he is doing and cares about his grade. Unfortunately, his and my being good students still does not make up for what the third group member is lacking. I have just gotten out of a group meeting this afternoon to discuss the PowerPoint that I had made last night using information that I and the reliable team member had gathered. The third member was to have researched certain parts of the assignment and have his part to me by yesterday afternoon like the rest of us, but because he did not, I ended up putting aside work I needed to do for other classes so that I could get his share of the research done and create the PowerPoint. It was 11pm on Saturday night when I got done. The unreliable one told me today that he had found some good websites with information, but never showed it to us or explained why he did not meet our deadline.

At our meeting today, we went through the PowerPoint, making edits as we went, and decided on more detailed talking points to fill the five to eight minute presentation requirement. The unreliable student kept trying to edit the wording on the PowerPoint, which was fine, except none of his suggestions made any sense to the other two of us. It was as if he was looking for things to challenge us on and was detracting from what we needed to accomplish. The PowerPoint was written as snippets of information which would be used as talking points for our group presentation, where the finer details will be discussed. I am wondering if his insistence of adding complete sentences and every last detail is because he knows that he does not know the material and simply wants to read from the slides. We met for almost an hour and a half and accomplished what would have taken just the two of us about fifteen minutes to complete.

Working with this student is the most frustrating thing that I have had to deal with so far in college. Luckily, after this week’s project presentation, I will never have to work with him again on any more projects. (At least I hope not!) We have another project assigned as larger groups that I am also currently working on, and so far, no one in this group seems useless or counterproductive. It’s unfortunate that this individual is having some of the issues he is having, and I am normally concerned for people who are struggling, but he does not seem to care to do anything but put on a front that he is knowledgeable and to create a ruckus, which somehow must make him feel like he is important or something. It’s Sunday afternoon already, and I feel like I need a weekend to recover from this past week and weekend.