Legitimate groupwork versus free riding
Groupwork at university appears in many different forms from informal class discussions to assessable group assignments. While groups can be beneficial for learning and employers particularly value teamwork skills, there are also potential problems, some of which constitute academic dishonesty.
Whether all students in a group contribute appropriately is the most common academic honesty concern with group work. It is not only a concern of group dynamics, because assessed pieces of work should fairly and accurately reflect the abilities of students who claim the work as their own. If students who have not contributed to group work gain the same mark as those who have, the marks would no longer represent true description of students' abilities.
As a general guideline in Group assessment tasks:
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You are permitted to discuss group assessment criteria with other students in the unit.
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The group may choose to give different types of tasks to each member as long as each individual contribution is of equal effort.
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You should discuss details of the assessment task only with members of your own group.
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You can share all material within your own group, but should not acquire or use materials prepared by students in other groups
Ask yourself, would this level of collaboration deceive the examiner about who really did the work and whose ideas these really are in our assessment?The information provided here is general advice on honesty in group work. Your Unit of Study co-ordinator may advise you of different requirements which are specific to your assessment. If you are still unclear after reading the assessment requirements please consult your Unit of Study coordinator.
The following are examples of unacceptable co-operation in groupwork assessment tasks:
- The group joins up with another group with the same assessment task and agrees to share all the material prepared, which in practice halves their workload.
- The group finds an essential text in the library, which provides them with the majority of the key information that they require for the assessment task. One group member borrows that text from the library and others in the same group place requests on it so that no other group can borrow it before the assessment task is due.
- A member in a group either does not contribute to the group assessment, or fails to make an equal contribution to others in the team, knowing the mark will be the same for every member of the group based on the final product and the other members are working hard to achieve at least a distinction. This is called the passenger or 'free-rider' effect.
More Resources
If you wish to learn more about working in formal groups, you can start with the following website:
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Groupwork for students
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University of Sydney, Faculty of Economics & Business -
Group work and collaborative writing notes
, University of California
What would you do?
You are working on a group assignment and two members of your group are really keen on the topic and clearly ready to take on more than their fair share of the work. You and another group member find the topic uninteresting and quite difficult and you both would be happy with a lower mark than what the others aspire to.
Here are some good reasons for contributing a fair share to a group assignment. Which one would be the most persuasive for you?