Getting Graded on Group Projects is Fair - second-hand-tigers/badocter-career-learnings GitHub Wiki

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Getting Graded on Group Projects is Fair

Two companies turned me down after internships, not for my technical skills but for how I worked with the team. Group grades are the cheapest version of that lesson you will ever get. Take them seriously.

I can't speak for other majors, but I recall a significant number of engineering students complaining about the inherent unfairness of having their grades reliant on the performance of others during the capstone project of our senior year in 1993, and other smaller group projects that took place in a few other classes. I suspect this attitude is still common:

Engineering attracts students with math and physics aptitudes and STEM adjacent hobbies (i.e., strong technical skills) who don't necessarily have strong skills in the first three of the four-development-dimensions: Leadership, Business, Interpersonal, and Technical (LBIT).
K-12 and most university course instruction all the way through graduate school teach and judge students based mostly on individual performance where there is structurally one mentor (teacher or professor) directing the study of one or more mentees.

For my part as a student, and as an introvert according to any of the personality/working style tools (e.g. INTx by Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)), my study habits tended toward reading and working problems by myself, relying on teacher/professor feedback to correct my errors along the way, and not so much on studying together with peers. When I graduated from Lehigh University with my Ph.D. in chemical engineering, I had devoted nearly a decade to honing technical skills academically and was under the delusion that technical skills were all I really needed and that someone else in the business would handle the non-technical functions, despite already having interned at two companies that passed on taking me on as a permanent employee — and, as I eventually realized, it was my non-technical skill set that cost me both offers (see I Learned This One the Hard Way and Lone Wolf at Air Products).

Why getting assessed for group performance is fair

The previous section establishes the case for urgency: I got rejected for employment by two companies because I had poor interpersonal skills and did not engage with the team. Getting job offer rejections is real grading that has professional as well as economic impacts. That rejection hurts more than any bad grade I ever got in school, and for someone who manages to land a job only to be rated as a poor performer in the team environment and gets fired, that feels even worse since we feel the loss of something significantly more than not having had it in the first place — called loss aversion (see Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow).

It is infinitely preferable to learn these lessons by "failing small" in school group activities and getting feedback from mentors to correct the attitude and behaviors that can help avoid "failing big" on job performance later. Your mentors are doing you a favor when they challenge you with activities that require teamwork to succeed so that you have the skill set developed by the time you enter the workforce. The favor is even bigger than you think since failing someone and giving candid feedback itself is a challenge — the mentee and/or their parents are often resistant to the feedback. I once argued with my own boss during a performance review when given candid constructive feedback (see I Learned This One the Hard Way).

If you have ever wondered why student athletes seem to be preferred to pure academics with slightly higher grades, in my experience employers are looking for signs that the teamwork lessons have been experienced and hopefully learned. Very few engineers fail in the workplace due to technical ability; it is almost always poor teamwork and interpersonal interactions that are their undoing, and these behaviors are much more difficult to teach someone than building their technical skill.

Engaging with groups early is a critical enabler

Getting involved in an extracurricular activity is among the most effective ways to learn the importance of teamwork to reach a shared goal and practicing how to work together effectively with peers. I give examples from my own background in the Boy Scouts (now Scouting America) as well as sports and band (see Extracurriculars), but somehow the message of working effectively with peers did not fully stick or translate into the professional conduct of my early career (see Teammates or Competitors? for why). Even having failed to fully learn those lessons, once I did see the light, I frequently referred back to the lessons of those activities as a reference for how to approach challenges I was currently facing, so those learnings were not wasted, they simply took a bit longer to kick in in other facets of my life.

How to proceed

Teamwork is a skill like any other. It improves with practice and it needs to be used throughout your life for you to be effective in the workforce and to become the mentor of tomorrow — the go-to expert whose advice everyone seeks when the really big challenges hit an organization.

Get involved in an extracurricular as they almost always have a team element associated with them
- Some extracurriculars, like chess club, may look like they don't involve teamwork, but if done right members coach and encourage each other.
  - Celebrate when a mentee surpasses you — it is what every mentor should hope for their students.
  - If there is a competitive event, the team has to come together to organize and promote it. Promoting the activity to attract newcomers is networking.
  - If you see an opportunity that the club is not yet pursuing, raise the idea and volunteer to take the lead. This exercises and demonstrates Leadership, Business, and Interpersonal LBIT dimensions.
Look for teamwork opportunities in your classes
- Study groups can be effective, just be sure to balance focus on study with social aspects that will crop up — but that balancing act is practice too since teams at work can get distracted with day-to-day chit-chat too. Learn how to leverage breaks to recharge and then jump back on track.
- If you have an idea for a group project in a class, get buy-in from some of your classmates and approach the teacher/professor. You will probably take them by surprise, but in a good way. Maybe it becomes a class assignment, maybe it becomes extra credit.
  - In high school biology class in 1986 we had to do a fetal pig dissection extracting certain organs. At the end of the lesson, a classmate and I approached the teacher and asked if we could continue the exercise outside of class, and he agreed to let us take one of the specimens home and told us we would get extra credit if we could extract the brain and spinal cord in one piece, a formidable challenge since they were both encased in bone. I can't say my mom was too thrilled about me and my classmate performing this surgery on the kitchen table, but we got the extra credit.
- Seek out feedback from your teachers and coaches on your team's effectiveness: what is working as well as areas of improvement and suggestions to develop past the gaps. You can't teach yourself if you don't know what you don't know, and that is why even if you are leading something you should seek mentor advice on leading. "Don't train alone, it only embeds your errors" (Vesemir, Little Ciri and Geralt in Kaer Morhen: Young Lady in Training (Witcher 3)). You will likely need that mentoring support when you encounter difficult team members, and you will encounter them now and then throughout your life, so that is itself a skill that requires practice.

My priorities as a mentor now

Having retired from industry and now focusing on engineering education outreach at Lamar University, it is no doubt puzzling to some that I am not teaching either the core technical curriculum or technical electives despite having more than 30 years of experience honing my technical craft and having taught technical subjects in the industrial environment for decades. This brings me back to a comment made earlier in this page: engineers rarely fail in their career due to technical shortcomings; it is their underdeveloped interpersonal skills that overwhelmingly contribute to poor performance reviews with impacts including poor raises, lack of promotions, and even loss of employment (see Being a Successful Expert Isn't All About the Technical Skill).

My goal is to teach students the skills they most need to improve beyond the current base to succeed. The fact that engineers rarely fail due to lack of technical skill is testament to the quality of technical education universities already provide. My help is not needed in the technical arena that programs are already winning in, it is needed in the not-technical areas where programs are still working to improve to best serve their students. This initiative is in line with the Strategic Vision elements of Career Stage 4 (see Technical Career Stages): driving emerging innovations to commercialization and promoting regional/global development programs and discipline health.

The other part of Stage 4 is ensuring institutionalization of the learnings across generations. There is already a succession plan in place with a named backup to take over when I become unable to continue, and some day they will name and pass my contributions as well as their own and those of perhaps many others to their successor. There is a checklist to ensure important items do not fall through the cracks during handovers, and each successor can add to it — formalized procedures ensure thoroughness where word of mouth does not. Health and integrity of the succession plan pipeline is the group activity that will keep this initiative going and evolving to meet the needs of tomorrow.

References

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
CD Projekt Red (2015). The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Scene: "Little Ciri and Geralt in Kaer Morhen: Young Lady in Training." YouTube

License: © 2026 William Docter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, remix, and build upon this material, including for commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit to William Docter and indicate if changes were made. Video game dialogue quoted for commentary remains the property of its rights holders and is not covered by this license. The Second-Hand Tigers logo is not covered by this license. All rights in it are reserved.