Management
Why Group Work Is the Hardest Assessment to Get Right
It is the closest thing a curriculum has to a real organisation, and the easiest thing for a department to run badly.
Sofia Marchetti6 April 20266 min read
No assessment format is more resented by students or more defended by employers than the graded group project.
The resentment is usually about free-riding, which is a design problem rather than an inherent flaw: peer-weighted marks, staged deliverables and rotating roles remove most of it.
What remains is the genuine difficulty, negotiating with capable people who disagree with you, and that difficulty is the entire point. A cohort strong enough to make group work uncomfortable is a cohort worth joining.