It was a 13 week class and the person minimally contributed by just showing up to meetings such that you couldn't say "he didn't show up." We had to do some D3js visualizations and one time he even sent a photo shreenshot of a chart rather than actual code to embed onto our project site.

One time he gave us a hard time about not being able to meet at any point except his lunch-hour. So we're all on Eastern Time at 3pm during the workday and he's on zoom...eating a sandwich as we spoke. So we gave up, we didnt even include him on any conversations because it was negative value.

In speaking with other students, 5-10% of the graduating class were complete free riders. Some were sponsored (e.g., federal government employees, etc) and were not only free-riders in terms of work, but also in terms of cost. Further, when graded your team got graded based on how many people you had, which many of us spoke up against especially given randomly assigned groups.

That said, some of my randomly assigned teammates were awesome, we're still friends, we formed great bonds and I wouldnt want to miss that experience.

We had a fairly similar grading program in my IT capstone project. The professor made it clear that if a group had either a total grifter or was an all-star team exceptions could be made. We had to give lots of presentations and question and answer sessions. It was generally pretty clear to the entire class which students were slackers and couldn't answer questions and which ones knew their stuff.