The paralles of Group projects

Similarly to most individuals there’s a negative response that is associated with group projects. In on sense a group project can be a positive experience with a great deal of collaboration between group members, however this seems to be very different than in most of my real life experiences involving group projects.

The first example of a group project I had was from my Econ 203 group project, which was a group of 4 or 5 working on a specific assignment. This whole issue of group size should also be mentioned because most times when I am in a group with more than 4 people, there always seems to be someone who isn’t willing/able to work on the project at times when others are free. This whole circumstance is very annoying because even if there are multiple dates/times when some members decide to get together there’s always an outlier who is busy.

In this example it was 2 individuals that had very busy schedules because both were athletes and who had to focus on practice and other activities involved in their sport. This caused a problem because they were always busy right after their classes and didn’t have any time to discuss/work on the project with us group-mates. This resulted in a disorganized system, which basically meant that 3 of the people would be working together and the other 2 had to talk to us either over email or Facebook. Both of these options where very annoying because one of the two people wouldn’t respond to an email or Facebook message; making communication between group members very difficult, thus becoming very problematic to agree on who would do what parts of the problem and ultimately ended up hindering our groups overall success. As in R&B chapter 8, there wasn’t any group synergy because all members of the group weren’t on the same level of understanding as the others who met in person.

This whole issue of group synergy is very important to overall success because if one individual isn’t communicating with the other group members there seems to be a lapse in the group dynamic. In addition, there’s a lack of communication which causes the group dynamic to be split up and focused more on a few people, who are communicating while the others have no understanding of the project and what still needs to be done.

In this case it is very annoying to do group work because I feel that there will always be a lapse in the group synergy due to some individuals being left out of necessary meetings and come out with a lack of information.

Another group project where a similar problem arose was in High School when I had to do a group presentation where the teacher gave us a scenario and in a group of 5 we had to give a lengthy presentation about what we would do in this situation and how would we go about accomplishing this.

Once again, this ended up being a struggle because different people were busy at different times and sometimes weren’t willing to compromise on the meeting time, thus causing conflict among some group members. In addition, this made it very difficult for everyone to agree on one strategy that we would use and arguments about different ideas occurred, which cause the group synergy to be split up into some who agreed on one strategy and others who agreed on another strategy.

This whole situation was very annoying because I feel that communication was split up among these cliques. Once again, I feel that in this large of a group there will always be individuals who disagree on some facet of the project and cause a lot of inefficiencies, thus hindering the overall success of the project because concessions are needed in order for everyone to agree on one strategy.

These two examples really prove to me that in order for a group to be successful the level of communication between group members should be very high. In addition, the size of the groups should be examined to determine if a single opinion is to be made, such as in my experience with disagreements between individuals. Overall I feel a churn in my stomach when a teacher mentions a group project because while some of the projects are successful, there are also others that are unsuccessful due to ineffective leadership and lack of collusion between group members.

The struggles of perfect distribution

I agree with what the article is saying because I feel that obviously the income isn’t proportionally distributed to individuals even though in the perfect would this would be one of the many goals of society to really make people equal. In addition, the article talks about the marble distribution, which seems a little elementary, however this distribution is very skewed to one side aka the rich people. The whole topic of people with more opportunities beating out the less fortunate is also very significant because I do agree that and it is obviously noticeable especially in the college application process and job market search. 

I have experienced both the benefits and problems associated with group activities because for some situations I feel it’s very hard to equate someone’s performance with another person’s performance.

My experience with the benefits of group activities is on my Econ 203 group project, which ended up in a very equal distribution of tasks and thus made it easier to see who was motivated and did their best work and who didn’t. While everyone got the same grade there’s always an option to talk to the professor if one of my group mates did minimal work. The reason it was a benefit is due to the equal responsibility of each group member and that each member took care of business; enabling a much more productive product. In addition, I feel that this push for equal responsibility is a very good thing because how can an individual be assessed on their part if they didn’t fully contribute to the whole team’s goals. The last reason that this situation worked out was because every group member was asked to give a performance review of each other; holding each individual responsible for their effort, however the group grade as a whole reflects group motivation more than individual motivation.

While I wish that every group activity would have a positive experience sometimes a negative/self-centered approach happens. A time in my life where I have experienced this self-centered approach is when I was doing my on an important science project during my sophomore year of High School. This turned out to have a bad outcome because some of the group mates didn’t actively communicate how much of their part of the project they needed help with. This lack of communication caused a very negative outcome because people were only self-motivated and cared only about their portion of the project or having other individuals finish their part for them. This was very irritating because for someone who tried their best on the project their performance was brought down by the lackluster performance of another individual. In addition, while it was easy to see who hadn’t done their part of the assignment the teacher still gave us the same grade because it was a group project not an individual project, which really aggravated the other 3 individuals who worked hard were punished for another person’s lack of motivation.

While this whole issue of distributing is easy to figure out the hard part is coming up with the appropriate distribution for an individual depending on their effort/motivation. In addition, the article also got me really thinking about morals. This is because I feel like the whole distribution curve is very skewed, which means some individuals are cut out of the benefits while other benefit from outside variables such as: money, and connections. 

So this topic of morals should also be intertwined with income distribution, as seen in the real world, some individuals make questionable or unethical decisions when it comes to opportunities aka opportunism. 

The cost and benefits of "Illinibucks"

I believe the whole Illinibucks could be used for things like cutting in line for basketball/football tickets because that is a market where the people who don’t want to wait in the lines could pay a certain amount of Illinibucks to cut the line. I think that this system could cause problems due to potential age differences an thus the topic of “Senority” comes in, however if people paid certain amounts I think that even if an individual was a Freshmen they should have opportunity to buy the same illinibucks as upperclassmen. So basically if a student is willing to pay for the Illinibucks, then they should be able to have the same opportunities as anyone owning Illinibucks.

The first thing that I would be wiling to spend money on is a “perfect” class schedule. The reason for this is that it would enable more students to get their preferred schedule, which would help keep their happiness “high”. In addition to this I believe that I would also use Illinibucks for things such as books, sports tickets and discounts on food or other goods that’s students regularly use. However, this system would be difficult to figure out which goods the Illinibucks would be used for. Also I could really imagine other uses for these Illinibucks other than these options because these are, at least to me, the most important things that Illinibucks could be used for.

The prices for these Illinibucks could spark a number of prices because picking one set price would cause differences in the amount of money brought in by the school, which is obviously not going to happen because we all know the school isn’t trying to lose money on this endeavor. In addition, if the prices were too low then too many people would buy these Illinibucks, which would make people not really benefit because there is still risks of not enough space in certain classes, which would defeat the purpose of the Illinibucks. On the other hand, a price set too high would mean that only a very small number of people would benefit from this and only because they are more fortunate or have more personal wealth than other students. This obviously would spark lots of controversy because the “lower” class students would be removed from benefitting and would be angry when they didn’t get equal opportunity as other students. Overall this Illinibucks scheme would be extremely hard to implement because a lot of people such as upperclassmen with high GPA’s would be angry when a spot in a class was taken by someone who paid money to get priority over other students.