Should unis ditch group assignments?

Is it time to get rid of group assignments at university? Federal Opposition education spokesperson Julian Leeser thinks so. On Thursday, he called for universities to drop group assessments entirely, arguing they are fundamentally “unfair” and “cheapen” degrees.

In a speech to the Universities Australia conference in Canberra, Leeser said:

Students feel, instinctively, that in many cases it is deeply unfair to assess them individually based on others’ work.

His logic is one many students will find familiar: one person inevitably ends up doing all the heavy lifting, while others coast along to a shared grade. Leeser added collaboration is merely a “soft skill” that should be taught in the classroom, but not formally assessed.

I understand the need for employers to have graduates who can collaborate in the workplace, but these are soft skills which should not be the subject of a university assessment system.

This is a seductive argument. But it ignores the realities of life inside our universities, as well as the skills we need in today’s workplaces.

Group assignments make sense for unis

There is a pragmatic reason why group assignments persist. They lessen the marking and feedback load, particularly in courses with high numbers of students. For cash-strapped universities, the efficiency is hard to ignore.

But universities do not use group assignments simply to save time. In many disciplines, they are part of a core requirement to graduate.

In the health professions, for example, accreditation standards require students to demonstrate interprofessional practice – or working with other professions.

You cannot be an effective nurse, physiotherapist, or doctor in a vacuum. You must be able to function within a multidisciplinary team, where the stakes are literally a matter of life and death.

Group assignments also teach important communication and collaboration skills. Research in my lab, led by Suijing Yang, suggests students often spend as much, and frequently more, time negotiating how a group assignment will be done as they do actually doing the work. This negotiation is an important part of the learning process.

This negotiation is often referred to as “co-regulated learning”. There is an extensive body of evidence supporting how crucial skills involved in co-regulated learning are for life. These include emotional regulation, problem solving and planning. They are so significant, these skills should be, and are, taught and assessed in many disciplines.

Are these really optional skills?

Just because collaborative abilities are not as easy to assess as other skills, such as factual recall, that doesn’t make them any less important.

In fact, they are seen as crucial for the modern workplace and, more broadly, for a functioning society.

As high-profile US researcher Sherry Turkle and others have warned, our constant interaction with digital devices could see these essential human skills atrophy.

Generative AI is poised to accelerate this decline. Some adolescents already report using AI chatbots as their primary source of companionship, opting for the “frictionless” interaction of an algorithm over the messy reality of human peers.

If universities stop mandating collaboration through group assignments, they will no longer be valuing the very “empathic muscles” that make us human and provide a foundation for harmonious workplaces.

How to stop ‘social loafing’

At one level, the dynamics of group assignments can feel deeply unfair. The vast majority of the cognitive and social labour involved in negotiating the assignment is never directly assessed. Often it is only the final, polished product that receives a mark.

Leeser is right there is always a risk of “social loafing” – where students contribute nothing while reaping the rewards.

But simple fixes, such as outlawing specific forms of assessment, are a crude response to a multifaceted set of problems. These include academic integrity concerns, workload issues, and the difficulty of designing effective assessment tasks, which are only exacerbated by the rise of AI.

As the AI framework published by Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency notes, universities need now more sophisticated ways of assuring learning. This means more of an emphasis on things only humans can do – not less.

The interpersonal communication and negotiation skills honed through university group tasks are precisely the kind of capabilities needed in the age of AI.

So perhaps the debate needs to be about how we improve and enhance group assignments – not how we get rid of them.

Then we could focus on recognising the work students do in those negotiation phases. This means effort would be recognised fairly and more emphasis is placed on students learning how to work with other humans.