Schaff: With these tips, group projects don’t mean the death of happiness

When an academic year begins, students often prepare by looking for ways to save time. Hoping to…When an academic year begins, students often prepare by looking for ways to save time. Hoping to fit more productivity into the same 168-hour school week, we search our memories of past academic activities for places warranting improvement. Often, those places are obvious. For example, cutting down involvement in floor-wide Halo tournaments, Facebook comment wars and weeknight alcohol binges opens up time for studying and the possibility of healthy circadian rhythms.

But this semester, more of students’ attempts to cut back on lost time should be directed to optimize a subtler time suck: group projects.

I really should clarify that group projects only pose to assault the schedules of a small portion of students. For many others, in fact, a teacher assigning a group project constitutes nothing more than a de facto gift of free time. That is, just as in high school, collegiate group projects suffer heavily from the free-rider problem: Twenty percent of participants produce 80 percent of the work. The other 80 percent get to have their grade and eat cake, too.

I’ve never been a free rider, and I say that with chagrin, not pride. Rather, I hold a strange respect for those who manage to take advantage of the awkward social situation presented by group projects to successfully skirt any semblance of responsibility. I’m not so impressive. Upon project assignment, instead of putting on an artful performance that allows me to spend would-be project time to address any other of college life’s tasks, I’m pushed by, let’s say, internal forces to do something temporally taxing: meaningfully participate. Be it a tinge of perfectionism, an appreciation of industriousness or a nascent psychosis — whatever it is, I choose to pour time into group projects when I could otherwise feast on the fruits of classmates’ labor.

Given the preceding rhetoric, you might think I’m about to endorse free riding as a worthy tool in college students’ time-saving playbook. But if you’re receptive to such an argument, this column isn’t for you. Instead, I’m concerned with helping those like me: those sorry souls similarly cursed with the unconscious impulse to throw time, energy and office supplies at any assignment coming their way. If you’re among those who just can’t help but participate in group projects, here’s how to convert the free riders around you into more-than-somewhat-helpful group members this semester:

Try not to seem too loud, interested or confident

Students inclined to hop on their peers’ backs start scouting for roomy shoulders the first time the group convenes. To promote more equitable teamwork over the course of the project, do your best to create an environment where everyone’s at the same apparent state of motivation. The less you look like you know what you’re doing, the better. That doesn’t mean acting dumb or catatonic; you just have to increase the likelihood that your groupmates will suddenly realize the need to step up.

Define roles, early

Too much aimless pandemonium gives wannabe free riders a welcome opportunity to disengage; it’s a lot easier to ignore the task at hand when you don’t know how you’re going to contribute to it. To combat this, ask someone else — remember, you can’t introduce yourself as the worker bee — to email everyone a list of responsibilities and manage the ensuing thread of project-related emails. Be prepared for group members who will try to indefinitely postpone the role-assignment phase by saying things like, “We’ll take another look at this next week.”

Set up group meetings with your professor

Getting your whole group in a room together is likely essential for the success of your project — or at least the fairness of it. But doing so is more of an art than a reflex. What you need are powerful incentives. Sure, you could try food or TV, but unless you’re getting filet mignon delivered, your best bet is somehow to make group members think their grades are on the line. If you can get them to worry so much about their professor comparing them to fellow group members — and that comparison coloring individual grades — that they attend these joint meetings, you’d be well on your way to taking work off your plate.

Third-grade tactics

Things might be looking bad. Let’s say you’ve done all the right things but your group members insist — subtly or not — on giving up their project to the magical worker fairies in the sky (you). In this case, your last resort is to attempt engendering that “we’re all in this together” feeling in people’s hearts. Yes, that means team-building exercises. Don’t just learn group members’ names; inquire about their majors or, if you’re daring enough, their thoughts on current events. But camaraderie doesn’t grow on trees, so if that fails, consider coffee — you’re about to have a lot of late nights on your own.

Write Matt at matthew.schaff@gmail.com.