If you’re a student, you have probably had to take part in a group assignment.

And if you’re anything like me, you have had your fair share of bad group assignment experiences. My most recent horror story included a group member arguing with me the day of our presentation about whether or not we were actually presenting that day. She claimed we were presenting the next week. We were in fact presenting our project 15 minutes later.

Group projects are meant to help us learn how to collaborate with others, but all they do is create excess stress. Group projects in the real work environment are not like this. Yes, they can be stressful, but they are different.

If you don’t do your part on a project in college, you will probably get covered by the overachieving, control freak in the group. If you don’t do your part on a project in the real world, your job is on the line.

I’m sure there are people in the work environment that let everyone else do their job for them, but it eventually catches up to them. In college, all you risk is getting a few points marked off if your professor offers a peer review section of the project. However, most of the time, students give each other 100%’s just to be a bro, because college is hard and they don’t want to risk their own grade getting marked down by an annoyed group member.

Someone not pulling their weight in a group project negatively affects everyone else in the group.

Collaboration on group projects doesn’t happen how professors want it to. I had two group projects this semester. I didn’t meet with either group. There was no possible time to meet up with everyone in person. Someone worked nights, someone worked during the day, someone had class before and after our class met, people went home for the weekend, someone got sick, etc.

We worked on the project on Google docs and slides, texted each other, and occasionally bumped into each other during class. If we had a disagreement, there was never any chance to actually resolve it and handle it like adults — it just blew up over text. We would passive-aggressively delete each other’s work on the Google docs when the other student logged off.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that group projects in college are pointless. Not because I don’t like working with people, because I do, but because the lessons we are supposed to learn aren’t actually being learned. If professors and TA’s want students to collaborate in ways that they will in the ‘real world’, then they need to provide better guidelines to do so.

They need to have a time for students to meet in person; set aside class time specifically to collaborate with other students, and set guidelines about what type of presentation needs to be done to avoid working solely online and not face-to-face. If the lesson is to learn how to work with other people, then students need to learn how to actually work with people and not just a screen.