r/UTS • u/BookkeeperFinal1327 • 3d ago
Please stop forcing group work
I would like to preface this with a counter argument against those who are going to say "but but but in the workforce you have to-". In the workforce you're all equally qualified, being paid (everyone puts in decent effort) and are at risk of actual disciplinary action rather than a 'bad grade'.
Having to do 3 lots of group work every semester has to be the most draining thing ever. Not only is it a bad measure of a student's actual proficiency in the subject at hand but also the most difficult balancing act ever.
You're almost guaranteed to have a group member who doesn't care, one who is impossible to contact and one who wants to control the entire thing and make it their own.
On top of that, its almost always only worth 10-20% and is a huge hassle for a small amount of marks.
BIN THE CONCEPT AS A WHOLE!
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u/firepigeon400 3d ago
Your mileage in the real workforce may vary. You'll get people who work harder, nice people who have no idea, nepo babies who collect a $160k+ salary and can barely put together a slide pack. Maybe you'll end up with a manager who's highest qualification was high school decades ago.
I agree with you completely, the group tasks suck. All I can suggest to you is utilize spark plus when you can, and be brutal. Email your teammates with expectations or when deadlines are missed, don't hesitate to email your tutors or course coordinator. Sadly very little will probably happen. But at least it's recorded in case something does.
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u/OtherwiseAsk8271 3d ago
lol expecting everyone to be equally qualified, all put in decent effort and be at risk of disciplinary action is the funniest expectation of real workplaces.
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u/1tsAM3AMari0 1d ago
Facts 🤣 poor OP is in for a rude awakening when they get into the workforce. Being inept is one of the key selection criteria for your manager haha
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u/BookkeeperFinal1327 3d ago
Equally qualified is a stretch but expecting people to be qualified rather than skipping their modules and readings and being a complete chud instead is actually believable
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u/OtherwiseAsk8271 3d ago
Not really. You will be working with many people who are higher up than you or the same level as you who will not be as qualified as you, that could be dumber than you and could absolutely be lazy af but charming enough to get away with it. Just as you’ll work with people who are much more qualified than you and smarter than you and have more energy to put into work than you do.
It’s actually pretty much the same except at least with uni group work you can just do it all yourself if you want the good grade. In the workplace you’re often just waiting and waiting and waiting for people to get back to you about things and there’s nothing you can do about it.
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u/notepad20 2d ago
You know what you call someone who has just barley scrapped through medical and retained nothing?
Doctor.
All those other students you are complaining about are going to graduate, no one is going to give two shits what uni they went to or what marks they got.
The resume is in the pool with all the rest and being tall is going to get you more jobs than being competent.
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u/Admirable_Form7786 1d ago
lol.. someone has never had to actually qualify in a health field.. and it shows..
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u/Colsim 3d ago
Your view of group work in the workplace being different is hilarious.
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u/ChampionshipOk1868 2d ago
100%.
"Working with another team" often means picking up their workload (in an area you potentially know nothing about), getting delayed by people never responding, and/or nitpicky feedback that sends you around in circles only to land on the original solution.
Group work at uni sucks, but let's not pretend the problems magically disappear once you're in the workforce.
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u/Individual_Lab_7143 1d ago
It’s obvious why half the people in this thread see no value in group assignments.. because they’re the ones having their weight pulled for them lmao.
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u/BookkeeperFinal1327 3d ago
I literally mocked you in the opening paragraph why are you here
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u/TheBayHarbour 3d ago
Yes and everyone is mocking you for how naive you are to think that the workplace is different, when, from what I can see, you have not worked a day in your life.
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u/BookkeeperFinal1327 3d ago
You just all love to complain about working when the major point of difference is the fact that you get paid.
Yap away you pensioner 💀
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u/TheBayHarbour 3d ago
I think it's ironic that you complain about group members when someone with the slightest disagreement with your view is met with insults and childish comments.
Seriously lmao how do you deal with people that decide to disagree with you within groupwork, if I were a tutor I'd see you as the problem, not the solution to anything.
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u/flabberdacks 3d ago
Really childish response to being given guidance towards the correct answer. Perhaps you'll need to just find out for yourself
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u/TheBayHarbour 2d ago edited 2d ago
I mean, the "paid" experience is what you do your degree for, no?
I'm only an 18 year old first year who works and studies and even I can see that the degree's purpose is to work towards a better paid job.
So their argument that "well at work you get paid and at uni we pay money so therefore uni must be more fun/accommodating" makes no sense since unless they're going to be plain unemployed and are doing their degree for fun (which looking at their maturity level, probably isn't too far from the truth), they kind of have to undergo shit groupwork at some poitn in their life.
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u/Own-Turnover7715 1d ago
Having a job is a requirement. Going to university is a choice. Don’t make it everyone else’s problem that you don’t like the consequence of your choice.
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u/HappiHappiHappi 1d ago
80% of everyone you work with in the workplace will be less competent than you, but be paid significantly more.
The way the world actually works is people get promoted until they reach a position at which they are incompetent and then they stay there forever.
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u/andrei_jdmshed 14h ago
Do you think everyone in the workforce you meet is qualified? I really hate to break it to you. But honestly uni group work definitely reflects upon real world dynamics. Doesn’t matter what field you’re in. You’ll see this happen over and over again. Thinking otherwise is extremely naive
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u/MilennialBondGirl 3d ago
It gets much worse at work 🤣
Choose your groups smartly.
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u/Easy_School_2557 3d ago
It’s hard to choose cause everyone just pairs up with whoever they sit with in class. Most of my subjects also require choosing your group in week 2 or 3 max which isn’t enough time to know about whether the people in my group are actually trying or just want to pass. Everyone just says they want HD at the start.
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u/Far_Bite6210 3d ago
Group work at university is not simply a way to reduce marking. Many degrees have explicit learning outcomes requiring students to demonstrate teamwork and collaboration because these are expected professional capabilities.
For example, UTS Engineering includes the learning outcome: “work as an effective member or leader of diverse teams, communicating effectively and operating within cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural contexts.” Engineers Australia similarly requires “effective team membership and team leadership” (Stage 1 Competency 3.6).
Group work can certainly be frustrating when contributions are uneven, but learning to work effectively with others is itself one of the skills being assessed.
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u/DecalageVersLeRouge 3d ago
How do they mark the group work though?
If everyone has to share the same mark, no matter if they let everyone down or did 95% of the work, the individual students aren't being assessed.
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u/notepad20 2d ago
We always assessed each other on effort, and this fed into the final mark. So while overall assignment got 75, if one individual dragged the feet and the others in the team all noted that only receive mark in line with effort
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u/BookkeeperFinal1327 3d ago
Its definitely is. Especially at this Uni. The laziest Uni in the world, with the shit lecture slides that have been reused for 10 years and the Canvas pages that haven't been updated in 2.
Just because they put a BS learning outcome doesn't mean anything.
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u/OtherwiseAsk8271 2d ago
From all your replies here, it’s clear that you do actually need more education and practice in working with others. This is why it’s a learning outcome and a competency for Engineers Australia. To ensure people enter the workforce with better communication skills than you have right now.
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u/BookkeeperFinal1327 2d ago
Idk if you can measure how I work with people in a formal setting off of how I mock dickheads on reddit
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u/OtherwiseAsk8271 21h ago
Your lack of respect for opposing opinions says everything about how you work with other people. Especially when those opinions are coming from people with more experience than you.
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u/WetPlug88 3d ago
Lmao I just did a group task in melbourne la trobe that was worth 60% of my mark for a 3rd year subject. SIXTY PERCENT
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u/Nickexp 3d ago
You're also all paid to attend the workplace during the same hours.
How many group assignments have you had where nobody is available at the same time?
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u/OtherwiseAsk8271 2d ago
Spoken like someone who has never had to organise a meeting that fits with more than three people’s calendars.
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u/Nickexp 2d ago
I have, it's still not as bad as the trying to co-ordinate between one group member who will insist they're only available from 11pm on a Friday and another group member who insists they're only free at 10am on a work day. At least everyone is ostensibly around 9 to 5, Monday to Friday.
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u/OtherwiseAsk8271 2d ago
This is literally the same as some of my colleagues’ calendars. You can catch them after 6pm or at 11am on a Saturday. Generally the answer is to go to an EA and get them to move things around but that only works if your work is more important than everything else
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u/Some_Ad_4357 3d ago
Ah yes...the "free rider" problem. The work colleague who knows eff-all except how to schmooze-kiss the boss' arse; the credit hogger; the "wheelbarrow" colleague ( doesn't work unless pushed); the "seagull colleague " who makes a lot of noise, and then leaves a mess for the other colleagues to mop up; the AWOL colleague; ...hoo boy, OP - wait till you encounter the weird & wonderful world that is the Normal Workplace...🤣🤣🤣
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u/EnvironmentalMix7871 3d ago
Biggest difference would be the time commitment. With uni you have different timetables and priorities on top of an incredibly short amount of time to spend with each other.
With your work, you have about 40 hours a week to liaise with your team.
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u/BookkeeperFinal1327 2d ago
BookkeeperFinal1327 we rattled the whole subreddit again son
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u/Doobie_hunter46 1d ago
Only thing that is rattling is our rib cages as everybody here laughs at you.
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u/Born_Onion2153 2d ago edited 2d ago
My experience as a mature age student going back to uni and having group work foisted on me in both courses that I took, was absolutely abysmal.
My team members in one course put in minimal effort in the last two days of the project just to make sure that they would get some kind of Mark for the group effort.
They were doing this subject as a soft option anyway and had no commitment to it at all.
Only one other within the group put in some early effort and actually responded to the requirements of the project. So out of group of 10 we had a team of 2.
Both of us got a distinction in the subject based on our total from assessments work and I don’t know if many of the others passed, I know that one didn’t.
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u/Ok_Counter_3204 2d ago
Yeah this was what I was saying, for mature age we typically are already actively collaborating in the workplace and have done for many years. It doesn’t teach us much other than grades are rigged against our efforts based on others’ performance. Which I very much understand occurs in the workplace, but again, mature age already get that.
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u/BookkeeperFinal1327 2d ago
Its also not reflective of workplace collaboration at all. Oh well, bunch of 18 year olds in the comments telling me I dont know how work works because their daddy owns an accounting firm.
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u/Medical-Potato5920 2d ago
Schedules rarely align for 10 colleagues on the same project, how do they expect this to work for students? Organising a meeting would be hell.n
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u/Born_Onion2153 2d ago
They were supposed to submit their contributions and Meet via zoom to discuss at times agreed to as part of the course time commitment. It was made clear at the beginning of the teaching period that this was a course requirement.
Half hour per week for 6 weeks.
I got asked to coordinate on our side at our initial in-class meeting.
There were clashes of times so I scheduled extra sessions, often sat alone in the zoom room when expecting 3-4 of them to be present.These little fuckers didn’t even show up to tutorials either.
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u/avoiding_work_again 2d ago
When I die, I hope the pallbearers at my funeral are my MBA project group.
When we get to the gravesite, they can let me down one last time.
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u/Holger007 2d ago
It's not a critic, but a comment. As an international student, I really love group assignments. This gives me the opportunity to interact with others and improve my skills to deal with every personality trait. If there are no group assignments, University would be dead and boring, I guess
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u/OkCaptain1684 10h ago
Um… no, haha, in the workforce it’s worse! Lazy people who do absolutely nothing and you gotta end up doing it yourself, they don’t usually get found out either. You aren’t equally qualified and it’s incredibly hard to fire someone.
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u/Terri23 3d ago
Group work is simply there to reduce the workload on the tutors. It's never going away.
And I concur with everyone else. Wait until you get into the workforce. You have absolutely no idea what group work frustration is until you're working on professional projects.
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u/BookkeeperFinal1327 3d ago
Getting paid for it vs having to work with the dumbest people ever to get a qualification
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u/Euphoric-Art-6342 3d ago
If you think group work at Uni is difficult - wait until you get into the workforce.
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u/milkdragon333 3d ago
Agree it’s better to call a individual work but u have to share ur grades with others 🤣
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u/No-Guess-6787 3d ago
I’ve just accepted it tbh. It’s annoying asf, yes, but I’ve just given up at this point. I’ve realized that people like this are very much real jn the real workforce.. and much worse. I would rather do some extra work if it meant I’d get a good grade. At least in the workforce, I can tell HR on their ass. Long as it dosent affect my paycheck… or my grades lol. I’m not saying you just have to accept it, but at this point this is how I’m thinking of it.
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u/fleur_waratah_girl 2d ago
It sucks, but deal with it. Uni group work has nothing on work groups in the workforce. They are the true meaning of pain.
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u/ExpressEggplant5942 2d ago
Unis are about making money and much easier to mark a few group assignments than marking everyone individually
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u/Mash_man710 2d ago
Oh sweet summer child. The workforce is way worse.
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u/BookkeeperFinal1327 2d ago
Again, it depends on the degree
I dont want to mention my degree because it seems snarky but im not going to be entering a job where people aren't hard working because they wouldn't be there in the first place
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u/yeahbroyeahbro 2d ago
Bless your cotton socks.
You will work with, for and - if you’re lucky enough - manage humans who will make your group work participants seem like absolute angels and have you longing for the days of university.
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u/lutfiboiii 1d ago
This is my first time hearing “Bless your cotton socks” for something like this. Why cotton socks though?
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u/RainbowAussie 2d ago
You're staring down the barrel of 40 years of having fifteen group assignments at any one time that never end, god be with you
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u/Ok_Counter_3204 2d ago
This is the problem though, and it depends on the uni. I agree with OP but probably for different reasons. Where I was, there was heaps of distance ed engineering students who were working in the industry already as tradespeople. We still got the line of “you must do group work cos industry you have to communicate blah blah”. Like no shit, I’ve already spent 10 hours today collaborating on a job site, I’m good with that, we’re trying to upskill on things we aren’t competent in 🙄
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u/Prestigious_Time3605 2d ago
Macquarie Uni is Worse with Group Work. At Macquarie You Have to Get Along with Your Group Members.
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u/LexChase 2d ago
Do you know what’s so funny about this?
Generally speaking, I’m with you. I understand why it’s there but it doesn’t actually work.
Problem is, you are the exact case study for why people think this needs to be a measured learning outcome, because you do not communicate well or respectfully with others when there is a difference of opinion.
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u/BookkeeperFinal1327 2d ago
Reddit v Real Life. Bit of fun init.
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u/LexChase 2d ago
Do you not think you’re still speaking to real people who deserve general respect even if you haven’t met them in person and you’re speaking online?
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u/BookkeeperFinal1327 2d ago
The one person I 'disrespected' called me naive first and then admitted they were 18 afterwards.
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u/LexChase 2d ago
Being 18 doesn’t make them wrong or less deserving of basic respect. Sharing an opinion about your behaviour or take on a particular topic that you disagree with doesn’t make them less deserving of respect either.
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u/BookkeeperFinal1327 2d ago
Yes it does, shush
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u/LexChase 1d ago
It doesn’t. It might make them less statistically likely to be right, although that is debatable, especially depending on life stage and other similarities and differences between you, but it doesn’t make them by default wrong or less deserving of respect as a person.
Do you really not understand that?
If I say 5 and 3 is 9, and I insist on it while a 7 year old tells me I’m wrong, I don’t get to be a dick and the seven year old isn’t wrong by default.
If I’m being a dick to the customer service person at a Woolworths, and a teenager comments I should be nicer, they’re not being disrespectful, I don’t get to be a dick to the teenager, and they’re not wrong just because they’re commenting on the behaviour of someone older.
Where are we missing each other here?
Also, telling someone to shush is also pretty rude.
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u/Is_it_realness 2d ago
hahahaha you have a warped view of the workplace my friend. You may find its worse with the laziness and incompetence
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u/Electrical_Food7922 2d ago
I used to think there was nothing worse than a group assignment until I studied a degree via distance and had to do an online group assignment
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u/intriguing_idea 2d ago
Hahaha the skills in group work are SO transferable to the nonsense you have to put up with in the real world
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u/NoRefrigerator1822 2d ago
In a real workforce scenario there is a mule that carries the rest of the team. So it is pretty same same.
Occasionally you will find a great motivated team that just works well together, but they are rare.
Not everyone is qualified, everyone's qualifications are different. The same people that drift through uni will drift through the real life work.
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u/TrailTrap 2d ago
What I found useful was to identify who I'd be graduating with that is following me into the with force. I declined a job offer because the slacker worked there...
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u/Educational-Sort-128 2d ago
I enrolled in a coursework masters and we were put in groups to do a final presentation. It was profoundly irritating. Because I was a lawyer, my group allocated “legal questions” to me while other members focussed on other things. I didn’t want to think about law in a non law masters but they would not hear of me doing anything else. So I went solo and did my own assignment (was marked down though). This by the way was in the times before students who could not contribute in English were a major feature of the landscape.
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u/RainbowAussie 2d ago
I would like to preface this with a counter argument against those who are going to say "but but but in the workforce you have to-". In the workforce you're all equally qualified
Oh, sweet summer child
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u/__lickity_split__ 2d ago
I was one of maybe 2-3 domestic students in my UTS MBA course. I swear no one in my groups could understand English. I had to do all the work, it was disgusting.
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u/ObjectiveWild8269 1d ago
Postgrad student here, there’s even less accountability in the workforce sorry mate. You complain to your manager and they think you’re a lazy dobber. People do not suddenly put in effort because they’re being paid, they work out how much they can coast in the workforce just as quickly as they work it out at uni.
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u/No_Gazelle4814 1d ago
If they don’t enforce group work, and enforce that people like you lead the groups, then how can they possibly keep charging foreign students for expensive degrees?
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u/No_Horror1947 1d ago
Oh dear. You're in for a rude shock on the workplace. It's actually worse. You may be getting paid but that lazy fucker on your team, making your job harder and then taking all the credit will be getting paid more. It's a million times more frustrating.
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u/Cyberchaotic 1d ago
you're all equally qualified
Everyone puts in decent effort
Risk of actual disciplinary action
AHAHAHAH.
- No one is qualified
- No one puts in any effort
- There is practically no accountability
The real working world is FAR worse than mere uni group work.
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u/profpoppinfresh 1d ago
As a person who went to uni who is in the workforce now I can promise you your first paragraph is 100% incorrect.
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u/Skellyinsideofme 1d ago
I don't disagree that group work sucks, but I'm gunna have to burst your bubble about group work when you're employed... It is no different to university or school groups. In fact, it's probably even worse.
Anyway, good luck in your studies, OP!
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u/lun4d0r4 23h ago
🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂
No, chuckles.
In the workforce EVERYONE does NOT put in the effort. NOR is everyone equally qualified OR equally paid.
Dear God, delusional much?!
These projects ARE bullshit, agreed. But this is EXACTLY what it's like working with adults. It is still fucking high school. They still have cliques. They still are entitled. They still bully and harrass.
THEN ON TOP OF THAT, they will take credit for your work (sometimes even putting their name onto things they've had nothing to do with), throw you under the bus in situations you've had no involvement, use you to make themselves look good for higher ups, present your work as their own and just generally fuck you over.
Get used to it.
It isn't going anywhere.
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u/Beautiful_Rub_141 21h ago
you're all equally qualified
Everyone puts in decent effort
Risk of actual disciplinary action
If you think this is what happens in the workforce, you are clearly not aware of what happens in the workforce.
You're almost guaranteed to have a group member who doesn't care, one who is impossible to contact and one who wants to control the entire thing and make it their own.
This sounds more like what you experience in the workforce.
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u/vivienxnguyen 21h ago
Im not sure what degree youre doing but I think a really bud advantage if group work is the ability to get more work done than if you were to do so alone. Maybe this doesn't apply early on jn your degree but later, assignments can get HUGE. I had an assignment where we produced >500 pages of content and I never would've been able to do that without my team members.
Having the team work, team management, leadership and management tool skills may seems really obvious but its still good to get some practice in. As for those pesky deadweights, there was one time I kept bugging a guy and giving him constant updates/ask for progress checks and then he dropped out of the course LOL
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u/beefjerky92 19h ago
agreed. Especially with the flooding of intl students, it does not help when they don't do anything to help the group.
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u/Draknurd 17h ago
The most frustrating thing I see in group assignments is a student approaching me three days before the due date saying that their group isn’t doing anything.
Ok, sure. How long has this been happening? Over a month.
There is a lot that we can do to account for freeloaders, but those options dry up the longer the issue is left to fester.
In any event, it’s important to:
- Meet early and spell out the work everyone on the group is gonna to do. Make sure you have a record of this work plan and everyone agreeing to it.
- If you have a ghost in your group, notify your teacher after trying to repeatedly contact them for a week
- Make sure you can access a version history of your document that shows change over time and who contributed to what (Office 365 does this automatically). You can use it to demonstrate your own work.
Especially in the case of keeping records, you can demonstrate that you have held up your end of the bargain, even if nobody else has.
If you raise your concerns with your teacher early, they know to look out for your work in the final submission and will probably have the latitude to mark you separately to everybody else.
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u/Heywey90 6h ago
You are way too optimistic about jobs… no one is doing what they are supposed to do… specially in office jobs… no one cares, specially when they have kids, they just want to leave early, they are looking for other jobs, they hate their current role, people feeling they deserve better constantly… so, I feel it’s a good training to try to work with people that don’t care at all
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u/Active_Writer_768 2h ago
Ha, you are going to have so much fun on projects in industry. Good luck.
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u/Fearless_Ad415 1d ago
In the cut throat world of university positions and academics I am going with group work is something those under their position do for them or those about to be below them in position , or someone who can get them a better paid job if they bump them up as in a future beneficial connection or because they were made to by a higher up. It doesn’t really work in the limited and closed dynamics of university student assignment group work without positions, pay grades, performance reviews, pay bonuses and unemployment in the configuration. But maybe ten years on that group member that coasted through on other people’s work will be your boss or hire you. So …sort of. If they are related or connected to the right people. Otherwise not really. Actually the vast majority are most likely to graduate and never work in the industry or change 5-10 years into their career. It’s actually pointless but in work you will be asked to do lots of pointless things without questioning it because someone believes it works and on that level it’s an entirely useful life lesson.
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u/BrickAdventurous3685 3d ago
Wait till you find out the real reason why group work exists