We’ve all had that moment.

We’re sitting in class taking notes and minding our own business when the teacher announces an upcoming project will be a group project. We instantly cringe. 

Do they think we are still in high school? Can’t they see we don’t know a single person in this class and don’t mind keeping it that way? You frantically scan the room with your eyes, everyone is already pairing up. Great.

There are tons of reasons to hate group projects in college. First of all, most of the time you end up with the most incompetent, I’m-just-taking-this-because-I-have-to kids who don’t know anything about the subject. Most of the time they will claim to be too “busy” to meet up to work on the project with you or will ignore your text messages all together. You end up having to do the whole project on your own while stressing about the fact that they won’t help. And if you do get a good grade on the project, you end up resenting them forever for benefiting from your hard work.

Then there’s the helpful but horrible partner who tries really hard to contribute but their ideas are so terrible and far-off from what the teacher wants that you can’t possibly use them and let it screw up your grade. With this person you usually come off as a jerk, rejecting all of their ideas and replacing them with your own. Once again, you end up doing almost the whole project on your own. Except this time, they are the one resenting you.

Then there’s the partner that suggests it’ll just be easier for you to do half and them do half and then you’ll just combine your information. Because of course what makes more sense than to have a completely incoherent project that doesn’t flow because you just put two halves together and called it done. Plus how can you put your faith in this stranger to even get their half done on time? So again, you do the whole thing by your self just as security in case they don’t come through or their half sucks.

Once in a blue moon, you hit the jackpot. You get partnered with the smart kid in class who knows all of the answers and has been preparing for this project all semester. They take control and do most of the project, assigning you small responsibilities like decorating or picking the slide animations. All of which you are totally cool with because you can see the A+ in your future. Unfortunately, these times are so few and far between that they don’t really make group projects worth it.

In a perfect world, teachers would realize that we don’t want to socialize with kids we will probably never see again after this class is over. And they would realize that we end up doing the whole project on our own anyways, so we should be the only one receiving a grade for it. I mean come on; do they seriously think we can’t handle this on our own?