Depending upon your perspective as a student, being assigned a single-grade group project is either fantastic or terrible luck.

Before even talking with your group members, you should already know your type: worker or shirker. For the shirkers, a group project is a free grade, for which little or no effort is required; for the workers, such an assignment entails at best a disproportionately large amount of work and, at worst, having to perform the task while carrying dead weight.

Single-grade group projects create a multiplayer game of “chicken,” resulting in the student who cares most about his or her grade losing.

This game is played out as deadlines approach and shirkers gradually reveal themselves by generating endless excuses for why they are unable to show up for a group meeting or produce their portions of the project.

Eventually, one student reaches his or her stress threshold and is compelled to complete the project unaided, thus losing the “chicken” game.

The argument most commonly used to defend this system of grading is that, in the “real world,” we will all be expected to work with groups of people toward a common goal.

Group projects, the argument goes, are practice for dealing with the collective action problems we are likely to face in our future careers. Given the strong probability of encountering precisely these sorts of dilemmas in the realm of employment, professors assigning their students group projects believe themselves to be preparing students to face the challenges of tomorrow.

On its face, this seems like a perfectly legitimate rationale for what may be understood as a system designed to punish the best while rewarding the worst. After all, those who are workers tend to figure out how to mitigate the shirking of others, which undeniably is a useful skill to possess.

The “trial by fire” of working with shirkers, when repeated, will forge determined students into stronger and more capable individuals, but not without a cost.

While fostering this environment in which the most industrious students become more productive, group projects also provide a practice arena for the laziest students to hone their craft of shirking. They master the fine art of “looking busy” to be able to make a case to a third party of their effort; they become skilled not in accomplishing work, but in avoiding it.

The worst consequence of the single-grade group project is that the shirkers pass classes they have no right passing and move forward into the “real world,” just the same as those who actually worked for it.

If professors permit these two groups to pool together into an indistinct mass by awarding grades uniformly, they forgo valuable screening devices by which these two types of students may be differentiated: GPA and class transcript.

It may be an old-fashion idea, but it only seems fair that those who do not put forth effort in a college class adequate to pass the class as an individual should be failed.