Seriously? Group work?

Everyone has a story about a time when they were forced by a professor to participate in the activity most dreaded  by the smart people of the academic world: Group work. The name in itself is and oxymoron because the "group" "working" never actually takes place. Group work is a myth. What is not a myth, however, is the concept that one ( occasionally two) people - who actually care about their grade- get roped into doing literally all the work. Sometimes this is a result of  A) other lazy group members simply not participating or B) the less intellectually competent members of the group do their portion, but they do a horrid job and the nerds have to fix it so they are not the laughing stock of the presentation list. Seriously, there is always one presentation that everyone goes " oh well at least we were better than that." I, for one, refuse to be "that" presentation.

I love how professors try to come up with ways to "ensure" that everyone does their part. It never works... ever. I don't care if you think you've come up with the almighty algorithem to the group work conundrum. It will fail. Teachers seem to believe that the best way to make group work "equal" is to devise a comment section about " who did what." The problem with this, is that 1) no nerd will turn in the cool kid for not doing the proper amount of work ( this applies especially to high school situations)  2) the evaluation is completed at the END of the presentation, thus in the midst of adrenaline rush and total and complete relief the nerd forgets that they spent all night doing the presentation without any help 3) The nerd already accepted the fact that they were going to do the work, simply to ensure an " A" and they really couldn't be bothered having an argument about the grade with their partners now that the project is complete ( this would require further, unnecessary communication).

It also annoys me when teachers assign group work and in response to the "groan heard round the classroom" they say something like " it's teaching you team work kids". UM, actually it's not. Teamwork is working toward a common goal that you all share. For example, on a lacrosse team everyone wants to win the game- so they work together to achieve that goal. What makes teamwork distinctly different from group work is that in group work you get the lovely mixture of people who give a shit, and people who don't. In each group you have those whose main goal is to achieve a solid grade, and you have the people whose main goal is to pawn off their work on the nerds/ over achievers. As you can see, these are not common goals. Therefore, group work is nothing like team work. At all. It's more like " Lets see how much stress I can pile on a few individual students so I only have to grade 8 presentations instead of 24 separate ones" work.

Conflict is defined as " two or more individuals whose goals are not in accordance with each other."
I rest my case.