For those of you have been lucky enough to make it through college without being stuck in a randomly assigned group for a project, I envy you. For those of you who are like me, when it seems to happens to you in every class you take, I feel your pain.
Teachers for some unknown reason love assigning random groups. Why? My theory is that it’s there way of torturing us. They use the excuse that it’ll help you in the real world when it comes to dealing with different types of people, saying that everyone has different personalities, backgrounds and ways of carrying out work.
But in the real world I’ll be getting paid to work with different people, while in college my grade relies on it. I could go on and on about why randomly assigned group projects are thee worst thing to happen in college but here are my best reasons.
Everyone has different schedules. If you get to choose your group you can choose your friends who have schedules similar to yours. If you don't get to choose your group, you're bound to get stuck with at least one person who has a ridiculous schedule. The worse thing that could happen, though, is getting stuck with that person who wants to work on it Saturday during a football game. Who in their right mind at Ohio State does THAT?
Either the group has too many people trying to be the leader and decide everything or the group has no one leading. Either way, the entire project will devolve into chaos with no real direction. Someone will want to do it all together, whereas others will want to divide it up. Dividing it up takes less time but there's a great chance one person won't end up doing anything because of *insert excuse here*. Or because they're just lazy.
Everyone's different personalities can seriously not mix. No one enjoys the combination of a super bubbly, outgoing person with a person who would prefer to not utter a word. While it's important to be able to deal with different personalities in the real world, it's seriously sometimes just painful to do just that for the sake of receiving a good grade.
Finally, there's always that rare great occasion where you get stuck with someone who does all the work and you don’t learn anything, but hey! At least you’ll get an A. That being said, I always recommend looking over the work of that kind of person, because some people think they know what they're doing when they really don't (heavy emphasis on "think").
