Write your group agreement
Fifteen minutes at the first meeting changes most of what follows. This does the fifteen minutes.
The short version
- Enter each deliverable with an owner and an internal deadline, say where the work lives, and confirm what happens if a piece does not arrive. You get back a ten-line agreement in your own words to paste into the group chat.
- Split by deliverable, not by topic, an artefact, an owner, a date. A group with this in writing behaves differently from one that only discussed it.
- Nothing here is saved. It rearranges what you type and hands it back.
Assessed group work produces two recognisable positions: the person who takes it over, and the person who goes quiet. They appear in the same group and they cause each other, and almost all of it is settled before the group meets, in whether the work was actually divided and whether the missing-work rule was agreed while everyone was still comfortable. This tool builds that agreement so nobody has to invent it later, badly, under pressure.
Before you begin
Have the brief in front of you if you can. You will list the concrete deliverables, hand each one an owner and an early date, say where the work lives, and set the rule for a piece that does not arrive. Nothing you type is saved.
Steps
Step 1 of 5
Your group agreement
Send it to the group chat
Select the text below and paste it wherever your group talks. Sending it round is the part that makes it real, a group with this in writing behaves differently from one that only said it out loud. This page keeps nothing.
Two things to do the moment you have sent it
Put your own internal deadline in the calendar as a real event, not a note, and tell the group that is your date. The submission deadline is the point past which nothing can be corrected, not a working date.
If the same pattern still repeats across several groups with different people in them, that is useful information, and it points at how the assessment is built rather than at your classmates. Raised as a design question, an individually marked component, a work plan due in week two, a midpoint check with a tutor, it is far more likely to land than a complaint.
Worth knowing. The two positions described here (the person who takes over and the person who goes quiet) are widely recognised by students and tutors and are not, as far as we can find, backed by a body of controlled research on university group projects specifically. Treat them as a description many people find accurate rather than a finding. Individual accountability within group assessment is a well-established feature of assessment design practice, and there is a large research literature on cooperative learning generally, but the specific claims here about who carries a project and why are craft, the reasoning of people who have watched a lot of groups, not measured outcomes.
Nothing here is saved or sent anywhere. What you type exists only while this page is open.
Written for Thought Club as general guidance, not medical advice. Free to read, print, and share.