Thoughts on Groupwork

Having spent the last 9 months of my youthful life here in the lovely city of Monterrey I have also been studying at Tec De Monterrey. I find most of my courses mildly amusing, however I discovered something interesting about them. Many classes here heavily encourage group work. Now I am currently in my 17th year of education (perhaps 19th if you count the extra year of kindergarten and pre-school) and in all my years I have always found the idea of "group" work to be like the idea of "communism" only good on paper or in theory. At least here in Tec the idea of groupwork is so heavily prevelant because the administrators believe it will encourage students to become more social which will in theory better prepare them for the professional working world where groupwork is a common practice.

Though here is my dilemma and critique of groupwork. In general I have found two common outcomes with teamwork and that is:

1) a few members of the group do most of the work while the others do nothing and all receive the same grade for unequal shares of work.

2) the teammates take a large assignment and divide it into smaller portions in which all team members then proceed to do their small portion and later bring all the pieces together in a small team member shortly before the due date.

I am not saying that the chance of a group actually working together throughout the entire process as a true group and everyone doing their equal part is not possible it's just not that likely. In the end the first outcome only seeks to teach hardworking students that their work is in vain because lazy people will take the credit and it teaches lazy people to just pass their work off on others and take the credit for it. The next outcome is just ironic because in the end the "group" is doing the work independently and the only outcome of making it a group assignment was to make it possible to take a large independent project into something much easier and smaller. However both outcomes do not promote the ideals those who believe in groupwork are striving for. For this reason I think groupwork in general is just silly...