Yeah, about half to a third of my final projects here have been group projects. I do think this makes some degree of sense--if you presume that everyone there is a mature competent adult, it lets you train people on how to work as part of a team. That's an important skill! And I do think they probably grade based on it (sometimes I've been asked to evaluate my teammates, and I think here the professor could tell who put most of the work in; we got individual feedback).
The problem is that a large number of the people here aren't mature competent adults. Some of them are straight out of college. I worked since 2018 and was working, if not always in my field, something adjacent to it (I was a college lab tech for a while). These people? Don't think they really know what they're doing. I had to explain to them that in graduate school, we were expected to cite sources and be specific when answering questions in an essay format. I also had to explain to them that you can't just go off a source like Britannica and need to look at the primary literature.
My grade may not suffer at all, but I take a degree of pride in the material I present. And it feels almost insulting to the rest of the class to give a presentation that doesn't delve deeply into what we're presenting on and isn't thought-provoking.
no subject
Yeah, about half to a third of my final projects here have been group projects. I do think this makes some degree of sense--if you presume that everyone there is a mature competent adult, it lets you train people on how to work as part of a team. That's an important skill! And I do think they probably grade based on it (sometimes I've been asked to evaluate my teammates, and I think here the professor could tell who put most of the work in; we got individual feedback).
The problem is that a large number of the people here aren't mature competent adults. Some of them are straight out of college. I worked since 2018 and was working, if not always in my field, something adjacent to it (I was a college lab tech for a while). These people? Don't think they really know what they're doing. I had to explain to them that in graduate school, we were expected to cite sources and be specific when answering questions in an essay format. I also had to explain to them that you can't just go off a source like Britannica and need to look at the primary literature.
My grade may not suffer at all, but I take a degree of pride in the material I present. And it feels almost insulting to the rest of the class to give a presentation that doesn't delve deeply into what we're presenting on and isn't thought-provoking.
I'm studying conservation biology.