Originally Posted by
QuiltMania
Perhaps you didn't mean it that way but I found the statement "group projects are for lazy teachers" to be quite offensive. Like it or not, collaboration and working in groups is a 21st century skill that all children (and some adults I know) need to have. Very few careers today are done by one person working entirely alone. It takes a lot of training from the teacher to teach students how to work as a group effectively. The OP's instructor probably assumed that, at the graduate level, the students already had these skills or would speak up if one team member wasn't pulling his or her weight.
I have to agree with parts of both of these statements. I don't think teachers are lazy, but they should know which students are doing the work and which aren't. Everyone in the group should not be graded equally, period. Also, students should get to pick their groups.
Unfortunately, after working out in the corporate world and even when I'm teaching, most of the group projects I'm involved in are like the group projects in school. A few people carry the group and others just slide along. There is nothing fair about it.