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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

CS group projects are biting like pair programming. Most CS group projects I've been on were a game of chicken where everyone would wait for others to do the work. If you don't pull your weight on pair programming it's quickly obvious and you'll get feedback.

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At this point I suspect that the "group projects" often done in CS degrees are actually intended to give the student experience in a failed project and learning from their mistakes, and understanding that not every project is a success or failure due to their actions alone.

Kind of backfired for me, because only very rarely were professors able to assign projects that were big enough that I couldn't do them entirely by myself, and I was outright incentivized to do so because even working at that speed I could still produce the whole project at A-grade quality when my teammates would have been satisfied with a B or a C.

Another cynical take would be that you were given perfect training for a software team in industry. Every team tends to have a small number of individuals trying to get that A, while their colleagues are not only satisfied with a B or a C but spend most of their days in meetings trying to ensure they drag down the software to their target.

Same here, I knew I was being exploited, but didn't care.

Those grades and work experience were quite valuable to myself.

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