The success or failure of the project, division, or company is the “team grade”. Regardless of how good your contribution was, the bonus or layoff that you get depends on the overall success or failure which is largely dependent on others’ contributions.
^ Luckily I’ve worked in companies where non-performing team members get booted pretty quickly. Can’t do that in a school setting. I’m not the type to suffer long term for underperforming people (I get every company goes through cycles). Ymmv.
I think teachers are often clueless about what really happens in these situations. My weaker student, when placed on such a team, was told bluntly by her peers that no one desired her input, they would write her part of it, and she needed to stick to the script they wrote so they could all get a good grade.
I also have an exceptionally strong student, who was told by her peers that she needed to do the project since she obviously could and cared about the grade, and they really didn’t, they explained.
Lessons were learned, but not the ones the teachers expected.
@roycroftmom , not sure if this was the case in your situation, but teachers’ hands are tied in so many ways.
Common Core dictates teamwork, even though academia is incapable of simulating real world situations.
They could get the same results for the students by pairing them for a practice test. Counting the graded results of pairing stronger students with weaker ones sounds like an attempt to boost the grades of the weaker students and the class average for the school at the expense of the stronger students. Written exams aren’t the place for team projects.
Group grading and assignments long predated Common Core (which seems to be blamed for everything these days). I remember group grading in elementary school decades ago and doing group labs in high school and college decades ago.
@ucbalumnus , yes, understood.
I didn’t mean to rag on common core. My only point was that teachers often have little latitude and how they teach and what they teach.
In OP’s case, the “ pilot program authorized by the assistant superintendent” was not the teacher’s decision.
Perhaps the useful lesson is that your individual results are often dependent on others to a greater extent than many are willing to admit.
You can try to choose a better team, but sometimes the choice is out of your control.
Our useful lesson was that my kids did not like their classmates much, and the damaged self esteem of one and the resentment of the other were the only thing they remembered.
It has been years for both of them and they went on to happy college and work options with no problems with adult teams. But they never forgot the project’s impact on their peer relations.
A useful lesson my kid learned was that the artistic kid who was weak on content knowledge was actually a great addition to the team, because they would spend hours making the content look great in exchange for not being made to create the content.
Another was that compatible personalities make better teammates than more brilliant people you don’t communicate with well.
Given the mandatory nature of school compared to work, it is useful to remember that the students forced to participate in the class may have very different priorities. Some were merely waiting to get married, some had trust funds to rely on, some cared if they passed, some did not. At least at work everyone has the same goal of remaining employed.
“The success or failure of the project, division, or company is the “team grade”. Regardless of how good your contribution was, the bonus or layoff that you get depends on the overall success or failure which is largely dependent on others’ contributions.”
That’s not true in most high tech companies, bonuses are tied to your individual contribution as well as meeting or not meeting group goals. Managers get a lot of feedback on who contributed little vs who drove the project. Let’s say you release a product successfully and the mgr or team lead gets $50K of bonuses to divide up, they’re not going to give 5K to ten team members equally.
“At the college I attended, students were usually encouraged to do engineering problem sets in groups”
That may be true for Stanford but not for most other engineering majors. I was reading an article a few years back and it made a good point on the two flaws of engineering education in the US - 1. every problem has a cut and dried answer with only one or two ways to solve it and 2. you can only solve that problem by yourself. I think it’s improving esp in the upper level courses but typically freshman calculus is a weed out course and you’re not getting graded as a group in that class.
Anyway back to the OP, grading on a test high school does seem a little odd, especially for an AP class. I can see group projects, labs but a test does seem to take the common core too literally.
The big bonuses of stock option gains are based on entire company performance (as viewed by investors). Yes, ongoing bonus grants can vary based on how managers view individual performance, but the biggest grants tend to be at initial hire.
Of course, if the group is cut or the company closes, the high performers lose jobs just like the low performers.
Learning to work together is certainly an important skill, but there are endless ways teachers can incorporate that in their class while still evaluating each student individually. Plenty of DD’s teachers have done this successfully, either by having both students turn in their own lab reports after sharing the experiment, each turning in their own report after sharing the research - or by turning in a group project along with a card, unseen by teammates, upon which each student explained exactly how they contributed to the project, and what did the teammates contribute. If the answers didn’t match - look out.
There is very little connection to teams in the corporate world, which usually have assigned team leaders, team members have defined roles in a project based on skillset, they can complain to the boss or find a new job at any moment. In the classroom, it is usually expected that all team members are equal, they’re reluctant to complain to an often unsympathetic teacher, and they can’t leave or quit the project.
As others have pointed out, colleges don’t send acceptances to “teams”, AP tests aren’t taken socially, scholarships aren’t awarded to pairs/groups. Teach the skills necessary to play well with others, but evaluate individually.
College applications are often team efforts, when recommendations are used. ALDC applicants’ special desirability can be team influenced (A) or inherited from parents who are the “team” (LDC).
And parents are part of the “team” in paying for college for traditional students.
Note that I was referring to “problem set” homework type assignments, rather than in-class exams. Engineering professors at many other colleges besides just Stanford often encourage students to do problem sets in groups. For example, MIT’s admission website at https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/what-we-look-for/ states:
“Many of the problem sets (our affectionate term for homework) at MIT are designed to be worked on in groups”
When S23 complained about group project, so and so didn’t do this and that, I shut down the whining immediately. Not that he was wrong about the contributions, but it doesn’t matter. I told him to work together, figure it out, their success is your success and vices versa. And if it didn’t work out and he got the bad grade, too bad, lessons learned. Better get a taste of the real world sooner than later.
Anyone remember The Breakfast Club?
That’s the kind of group work that enhances interpersonal skills!
Should be illegal or opt in for all those who want life lessons about people who don’t work hard. For those who already know, skip that lesson and hand in an individual work product. Honestly, why should this decision by a superintendent impact your child. I’d be on the phone and not with the super.
Why does this only happen in academics? I have yet to see a basketball game where weaker or non-players are put into the game so they can all learn teamwork and teach their peers.