I have always been hesitant about group projects. If you are in a class where you know no one and you have to recruit your own group, good luck to you. If you are like me and you are doing a group project over an online class and none of you live near each other, I'm sorry to tell you, there's just no hope.

Allow me to tell you the tale of my worst group project experience of all time. It was a business class, just like any other, where the professor took the business aspect of it just a little too far. It was not good enough that we were moving through the class at a breakneck speed, but on top of that, we had a semester-long group project that started on day one of the class. The assignment: create a fictional business and design an entire marketing plan for them. The requirements: you have to "recruit" your own group members through Blackboard (ugh) and assign roles and responsibilities.

Now, I should stop and tell you that I am a good egg. I am a student who does their work early and often so they can get ahead of the game. I have no ulterior motive other than my anxiety is through the roof when I know I have things assigned to me and people waiting for my part. Like a good egg, I was one of the first to post in Blackboard that I was looking for a group of like-minded students who would be willing to work hard and knock the project out with plenty of semester left. What I got was...less than that.

The groups were all to be eight (eight!) people in size. Our professor encouraged us to cut off the groups when we felt we had enough people, but the amount of work was best spread out across eight members. Since we had to make a fictional business, we had the ability to hire and fire group members throughout the semester as we saw fit.

My posting definitely garnered a lot of attention, as I was one of the first, but as I reached out to people to invite them to my group, I found the responses to be spotty. Uh oh, first red flag. Now is it possible I scared people off with my enthusiasm? Sure, I won't rule that out, but when you take online classes you have to live with the possibility that your enthusiasm might be mistaken for crazy. Eventually, I ended up with eight members (but that was out of more than eight who responded that they were interested in joining me).

Now is it possible I scared people off with my enthusiasm? Sure, I won't rule that out, but when you take online classes you have to live with the possibility that your enthusiasm might be mistaken for crazy.

The first week of the semester was spent debating on what chat system we use. Do we use Google Hangouts? What about a text message? How about GroupMe? We literally spent the first week of a five week class (oh right, did I mention that this was a FIVE WEEK CLASS?!) unable to decide what method of communication would work best for everyone. Eventually we settled on GroupMe.

In that first week, we lost three people from our group. They just dropped out without any warning. When we stopped hearing from them, I asked the professor about those students, and she told me that we were going to have to make do, since there were no free students, everyone left was in a group.

Great, solid start. I'll speed up my tale by telling you that over the next few weeks of the class, most members were out of pocket in group chats, did not turn in their portion of the assignments until the night before it was due (one even submitted their portion at 11:55 when the assignment was due at 11:59!), and most of the time, just had no idea what was going on.

Remember how I mentioned that you could fire people from the group? I figured it was not worthwhile to try to fire any one or two people, since the whole group was at fault, so I decided I would try to quit the group and go my own way. When I spoke with the professor about this wild idea, she not only told me it was a bad idea, she told me she pretty much would not allow it. It was just so much work to do so late in the semester, I would be dooming myself to fail. It is kind of like how they say "the grass is always greener" in reference to the idea that your other option is better until you get there, except this was "the grass is always browner."

Skipping ahead to the end of the story, we turned in the project, on time, but at that point I had basically resolved to failing the class. So be it, this is my fate as a sucker who thought he could energize a bunch of online students into being excited about a group project over the summer. When we got our grades back, our semester long project was a piddly 68%. I assumed the group project was a failure early on, so I KNOCKED MYSELF OUT to get as good a grade on everything solo as possible. In the end, I finished the class with an 89%, which the teacher took pity on my soul and bumped me up to a 90% overall.

There is no moral to this story, no happy ending (other than that A, which was pretty nice), just a good-ole-fashioned rant. To the college business professors out there: group projects do not really prepare you for the working world, turns out money is a big motivator for employees. Some students are totally cool with getting a menial grade and doing the bare minimum. No matter what, group projects suck.