Proposes group scoring as an effective way to prevent free-riders in group activities, emphasizing the importance of individual responsibility and cooperation. Explore the underlying issues of free riding and discuss the long-term benefits and social stability of doing the right thing.
In college, group work is one of the essential requirements. Before we delve into the different aspects of group activities, we must first define “what is a free rider?” The word “free rider” itself means to ride in a car without paying for it. A free rider in a group task exhibits similar behavior. People who do not do the work that should be done by everyone working together, but instead rely on the efforts of others, are called free riders or freeriders. This is a very problematic behavior in college because it means that you’re not putting in any effort, perhaps to the detriment of others, and still getting the same grade. Let’s take a look at the most effective ways to prevent free-riding and, more importantly, why it’s important to live right.
Group work isn’t just for credit; it’s a valuable opportunity for students to experience the importance of teamwork, cooperation, and responsibility that they will face in the real world. Through group work, we learn to communicate with others, coordinate our opinions, and work toward a common goal. These experiences foster virtues that are invaluable in social life. However, free-riders ruin the essence of these group activities and frustrate others. There are several ways to prevent free-riders and make group activities more effective.
There are a number of ways to prevent free-riders, but I’m going to describe one that I think is the most effective: group score splitting. Just like in any other class, you give points to groups, but instead of giving them “whole” points, you need to split them among the group. For example, if the group presentation is worth 10 points per person, and there are 7 people in the group, the score is 70 out of 70, and if the professor gives a score of 70 out of 70, all 7 people in the group get a perfect score, but if the professor gives a score of, say, 50 out of 50, the 7 people in the group have to split the 50 points among themselves, for example, 10/10/6/6/6/6/6/6.
Moving on to the advantages of this method, there are two main advantages. First, if you don’t work hard enough, you’re going to get resentment from the other members of the group, so you’re not going to get any points, so you’re going to have to work harder. If you don’t get in touch before the presentation, if you don’t show up to a meeting, if the group leader keeps track of all the attendance for each meeting and makes it public later, the members who didn’t work hard will have ten mouths to feed. Second, the person who did all the work alone gets the most points. If there’s a group of six people and one person is doing all the work, and there’s a group of five people playing, and there’s a group where all six people worked hard together, then of course the group where all six people worked hard together is going to get a higher score. The group that only one person did a good job is going to get a lower score. However, that one person who worked harder can monopolize the score. For example, if a group of 6 scored a total of 30 points, the one person who worked hard would get 10 points, while the other 5 people who were lazy and didn’t do the work would get 4 points.
This is where the problem and biggest drawback of this method comes in. The limitation of this method is when the hardest worker is not the leader. This method can be successful as long as the group leader tries to do their best and leads the group with a conscience, and it basically assumes that people have some level of conscience. I think a public vote would work best to compensate for this limitation: rather than voting out the bad guys, you rank who you think has tried the hardest and add them up. Statistically, the person who has tried the hardest will get the highest score, unless you pick a group member who has tried the hardest and the rest of the group gives them a low score.
What these descriptions tell us about free riding is that the fundamental problem with free riding is not living right. In a way, free riding is a phenomenon that arises from a difference in individual values about why we should live right and what our responsibilities are. You could say that free riders have the idea that they don’t have to live right. However, unlike them, I believe that there are reasons to live right. First of all, the reason why many people do not live right, that is, irresponsible behavior such as free riding, is to look out for their own interests. However, living right is actually critical to the successful survival of the individual. By engaging in virtuous behavior, you can ultimately benefit many people. These behaviors are like buying insurance for the future. If you only look at what’s right in front of you, you won’t last long. Doing the right thing by helping others, even if it means losing a little bit of money, will pay off in the long run. When you’re helpful, others are more likely to act altruistically. You’re more likely to feel good about someone who has helped you at least once. Of course, not everyone who helps you will reciprocate. But you’re much more likely to get help when you ask for it from people who live right and help others than from people who don’t live right and are just a nuisance. The same applies when you look at the “split the group” method. You could go hang out during the time you’re working on the assignment and spend more time on yourself, but by sacrificing the momentary gain and going to the group activity, you’ll gain the trust of your teammates and end up with a better score than those who ignored the group activity.
One more thing to think about here is that it’s not just about completing tasks, it’s about the importance of relationships. The process of collaborating, communicating, and building trust is crucial to building an individual’s social capital, regardless of the success of the task. Success in group activities ultimately depends on how well you build and maintain these relationships. It’s an important lesson that can be applied to the rest of the world: people who work well in teams are always welcome and will be given more opportunities.
The second rationale is that living right helps maintain the stability of society. Let’s take the world of armless people as an example: in a village, all the people don’t have bendable arms, which makes eating a lot of inconvenience. In an ideal world, two or more hungry people in this situation would help each other out and eat a hearty meal. If we dig a little deeper, we see that each person has two options in a rice-eating situation. The first is to help each other and feed each other food, as I said before. The second choice is to ignore the other person’s hunger and walk past them. There are four things that can happen in this situation. If you see two people, let’s call the first person A and the second person B. In the first situation, A helps B and B also helps A. In the second situation, A doesn’t help B and B only helps A. In the third situation, A helps B and B only helps A. In the third situation, A helps B and B only receives help. In the last situation, everyone ignores each other and helps no one. If everyone is morally unwilling to help others in order to look out for their own interests, everyone in this village will soon become selfish, and there will be no one to help them when they are in need. No one will be able to eat because no one is helping each other, and the village will eventually fail. The point of spreading selfishness like this is that it will soon become a disadvantage to yourself. We don’t even have to look at society to see this in action. If everyone selfishly leaves the group work to others, eventually no one will do the work and the whole team will end up failing. If you think “someone else will do it,” that irresponsibility will eventually come back to bite you.
In college, you’ll inevitably encounter free riders in group projects. Selfish people who don’t do any work, pass all the blame on to others, and still get the same score are everywhere. As a way to stop these free riders, we proposed and explained the “group score split” method, which is a way to split the score. I delved a little deeper into the situation of free riders and answered the question, “Is there a reason to live right?” If free-riding behavior continues, there will eventually come a point where you will be the one who suffers the most. And if there are more people who don’t live right and cause harm to others, society will eventually lose stability and fail. If you do the right thing and make some sacrifices, even if it costs you in the short term, you will benefit yourself much more in the future. And it is only by accumulating these virtues that society can maintain stability.
Finally, universities are not just about imparting knowledge to students, they are about instilling moral values and a sense of responsibility. Their experiences in group activities play an important role in helping them mature as members of society. In the process of solving the problem of free riding, students learn the importance of responsibility, cooperation, and trust, which in turn helps them contribute to building a better society. These experiences in college will be important lessons that will last a lifetime. Through group activities, we can take small steps towards building a better society.
