I’m at community college now and I hate group work. Thankfully it hasn’t happened much but I just finished an elementary algebra class with this teacher who always made us get in groups for exam reviews. He would not teach a thing about what would be on the exams during the reviews. He would just write problems on the chalk board to do. He even threaten to not help us anymore on the final exam review unless if we got in groups because he thinks “students learn better that way”. It’s not my job or my classmates jobs to help students. Why do teachers give group work? This is college and group work has no place in a math class. I hope when I transfer to a university that the professors won’t assign any group work in my classes so I’m just wondering if teachers at universities assign group work. Thanks you guys.
It really depends on the class and the professor. The smaller the class the more likely group work is. So far, I’ve only really had group work in English classes. Also, group work is pretty common in the lab portion of science classes. You probably won’t have group work in large lectures, but it is possible in small classes.
I’ve had plenty of group work in college. My computer science classes all required group work, as did many of my geology, geography, and urban planning courses.
All of my biology classes have had group work. Luckily, it’s always been much more pleasant than in high school–generally the standard minimum-accepted-effort from each person is higher
If you cannot work in a group in college you will have trouble in most jobs.
The vast majority of my classes in college have had group work. I think the only ones that consistently haven’t have been my Math classes. But all my computer science, gen eds, and dance classes have had group work, same with the majority of my music classes.
Definitely in science labs, as someone else said. Also I’ve been getting ahead for my clinical psych class in the fall and the textbook has a lot of group work; I don’t know how much of it will actually be included in the course though.
It depends on your major. I agree group work in math class is kind of weird. I never heard of group work for math before. But as a few people stated above there is lots of group work in science classes. Especially lab science. I was an accounting major I had little to no group work. However, my friend who was a marketing major had a group assignment in damn near every class.
I’ve had group homework in math, group presentations in several other classes, group papers, group experiments…
You act like book smarts are the same as business smarts.
Pain in the butt, but all of our kids as well as ourselves had group work.
It stinks when someone doesn’t pull his own weight.
I just think group work is stupid when it’s not necessary. I’m a Business major and most likely in Marketing too. I’m just finishing up my general ed. In my community college career so far, out of the 23 different teachers I’ve had, only like 3 of them made us do group work so that’s a really great number. Is it not very common for online classes and is it more common in upper division classes? I just think it’s stupid for a math class but English and PE classes, it’s not bad. It’s just with math, a lot of people don’t get the stuff so people that are not good at the stuff, how are they supposed to help a classmate? Teachers should be lecturing only for math classes.
@dodgers3222 And how do you know that?
I took a math seminar in college which was entirely in groups. Also had a couple other math/CS courses which were largely group-based.
Whichever job you land in the future, you’ll almost certainly need to work together. So deal with it while you can.
Yes, you’re going to have group work. And you’re going to have group work at work, too.
Haven’t had a class yet that required group homework…
Lucky. It’s kind of stressful and, in my case, impossible to divide up fairly. It was for Calc 2 and for most of the semester everyone did all of the problems and then compared answers to make a final version – which gives you the most practice, but is a real timesuck when the professor gives a “four people” amount of problems.
Some of D’s upper level math classes had group homework but very informal. Some people did it alone and not an issue. Had group project/partner project in game theory class. Also had lab groups in physics. Maybe one or two in other seminar style classes.
I’m not trying to sound like a whiner about group work but it’s just the teacher I just had wasn’t a good teacher so he wasn’t very effective at it while the two other classes I had in the past that had group work which was good because the teachers were good so it was easy to get through.
@dodgers3222 from my experience, the best indicator of group work isn’t really the teacher himself, but rather how well you and your groupmates work as a group.
In my math seminar class, the teacher barely taught anything. All the group work of trying to prove a lemma or theorem related to some problem was on our own. The professor did give helpful pointers on other things, like how to come up with those lemmas, or how to present them effectively, but we were on our own for the rest.
The problem with this teacher was that the math problems he would give during reviews for the exams would be completely different from the exams so it was very bad preparation. He was the kind of teacher that just passed out work without teaching it. He would also only do 1 example problem of something, then would do another one in another way and expect you to know the answer like that. He would just throw you in the fire with his lectures. The guy was an idiot. I’ve never had a teacher as bad as him. I failed the class because of him. But I’m glad the fall semester is almost here and I will have a much much better teacher this time so I know I’ll pass with flying colors.