Brooke Loder cautions faculty that the statement "You're going to have to write a research paper for this class" is only made worse for some students with the addition of "This paper will be a joint effort." The clincher "I will be assigning partners" takes her back to high school projects she ended up doing by herself.

Loder's first group paper at PC was a research paper on a 2000 Senate race in Grant's Parties and Political Behavior class. She and her partner decided to write the paper together to make it cohesive, rather than dividing the paper by the two candidates. They took turns typing and dictating at a computer to create the "illusion that the paper had a single writer." She attributes the positive experience of this paper to the fact that she chose her partner. Loder had a negative experience with another joint paper in which she ended up writing the paper herself, asking the partner only to edit, a job the partner was not able to do well.

Sarah Wells, writing a satirical essay with two classmates for Jim Skinner's Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose class, was nervous about the project. Although she says, "I always had hated group work," Wells enjoyed brainstorming out loud with her classmates. The most difficult part of the paper was actually writing it. Working with two seniors "who dove right into the paper with little apprehension," junior Wells felt guilty that she was not at the keyboard but just nodding in agreement when she liked an idea. She also was often annoyed by the "quibbles we had about small details of the paper like whether or not to place commas after introductory clauses and which synonyms to use."

Shannon McCall wrote group papers for three classes in the fall: Gustafson's History of the South, Grant's Parties and Political Behavior, and Grant's Political Science Research Methods. Elated at first mention of a three-person paper last semester, she assumed that "three brains are better than one and that [her] workload would be decreased." Although the papers and the workloads turned out to be more difficult than she expected, she found the experience a positive one.

McCall chose her group's members in Gustafson's class, working with two other athletes whose schedules were similar to her own. They all worked on the paper together, "taking turns typing and looking up quotes, all of us offering suggestions for wording and sentence structure. On another paper, however, her partner was a procrastinator, and McCall ended up putting in eight hours on her own and working late for three nights with her partner, resulting in a paper that was not as polished as she would have liked and a B grade that did not satisfy her.

Her last experience was very positive with a partner who was an excellent fit. She and her partner, testing a hypothesis about Generation X, learned how political scientists do research analysis. Spreading the work out over the entire semester, she and her partner avoided late nights and time crunches.

Students and faculty disagree on one point when it comes to group work: who should pick the group members. Realizing that in the real world one does not usually choose colleagues, faculty at times assign group members. Students, however, prefer to choose people they already know and trust: "The biggest factor in the success of a partner paper is picking a partner who is compatible and motivated," says McCall.

Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.

Group Papers