"How to Get the Rich to Share the Marbles" by Jonathan Haidt is quite an interesting opinion piece that discusses how people are more likely willing to share their excess wealth with those who do not have an abundance if there is an indication of an equal contribution. However, many times even in group work many people feel like they are doing separate tasks or more work and thus, believe that their individual efforts should therefore, award them with different rewards or a greater proportion of a singular reward.
I have had various experiences with team production in college. One such experience occurred in my freshman year. I was taking an introductory electrical and computer engineering course, ece110, and we had a write a group research paper on firewalls. The groups were randomly assigned. There was a high concentration of international students in this class and I ended up in a group with three international students and one domestic student. This would not have been a big deal if we were solving computational problems or something related to the class. However, we were tasked with writing a research paper on a topic we had not even remotely studied and this was a problem as the English skills of the international students were weaker than their domestic peers. We divided the work equally, but the parts that the international students wrote were unacceptable to hand in for grading; therefore, the other domestic student and I had to edit and revise their parts in order to make the paper have a singular voice and be more fluid. In order to compensate myself for the additional work, I was able to voice my opinion in a peer evaluation form that we were all required to fill out regarding the group paper and this produced a small effect on my grade.
This situation was definitely a case where I did not believe that an equal distribution of grades was the right solution and favored increasing my own grade over others. This relates to Jonathan Haidt's idea that people are less likely to equally distribute their reward if they feel that people are not doing the same amount of work or putting in the same amount of effort. Jonathan Haidt addresses this by claiming that we should not blame the people in the experiment or in my case the people in my group. Rather he claims that we should focus on procedural fairness and in his opinion piece he claims that those who make laws involving the economy also are colluding with the rich; thus, enabling the rich to stay rich and causing the income gap to widen. However, in my team production example there was no colluding between the participants and the instructor, so it is hard to blame the instructor for the problems associated with the paper. Ultimately, Haidt's conclusion regarding individual efforts and their corresponding rewards can be applied to many situations such as my example; however, assigning blame is a trickier ordeal and it did not match up in my case.
I have had various experiences with team production in college. One such experience occurred in my freshman year. I was taking an introductory electrical and computer engineering course, ece110, and we had a write a group research paper on firewalls. The groups were randomly assigned. There was a high concentration of international students in this class and I ended up in a group with three international students and one domestic student. This would not have been a big deal if we were solving computational problems or something related to the class. However, we were tasked with writing a research paper on a topic we had not even remotely studied and this was a problem as the English skills of the international students were weaker than their domestic peers. We divided the work equally, but the parts that the international students wrote were unacceptable to hand in for grading; therefore, the other domestic student and I had to edit and revise their parts in order to make the paper have a singular voice and be more fluid. In order to compensate myself for the additional work, I was able to voice my opinion in a peer evaluation form that we were all required to fill out regarding the group paper and this produced a small effect on my grade.
This situation was definitely a case where I did not believe that an equal distribution of grades was the right solution and favored increasing my own grade over others. This relates to Jonathan Haidt's idea that people are less likely to equally distribute their reward if they feel that people are not doing the same amount of work or putting in the same amount of effort. Jonathan Haidt addresses this by claiming that we should not blame the people in the experiment or in my case the people in my group. Rather he claims that we should focus on procedural fairness and in his opinion piece he claims that those who make laws involving the economy also are colluding with the rich; thus, enabling the rich to stay rich and causing the income gap to widen. However, in my team production example there was no colluding between the participants and the instructor, so it is hard to blame the instructor for the problems associated with the paper. Ultimately, Haidt's conclusion regarding individual efforts and their corresponding rewards can be applied to many situations such as my example; however, assigning blame is a trickier ordeal and it did not match up in my case.
This was quite an interesting piece. Let me ask one question before commenting on the rest of it. For the students who were weak in English, might they have done other work to compensate for that weakness? You talked about what had to be handed in, but isn't there also some work in figuring out what to write about the firewalls and couldn't international students have concentrated their efforts on that work?
ReplyDeleteI did like the example as you chose one where students were unequal in their abilities, but produced one team product. In some sense this is the converse of the example in the Haidt piece, where there are two products produced (marbles for each kid) but where the efforts might be identical.
The university does something like this for admission, where students from downstate schools, or inner city schools, typically not as good as the suburban schools around Chicago, can get accepted with lower ACT scores. The interpretation is that doing reasonably well in a less nourishing environment may indicate great potential then doing quite well in an environment with all the advantages.
Do you think that if you were doing a paper in a different language and other fluent group members fixed yours up, would you be content if they received a better grade? Do you think your grade was adequately "compensated" for the extra work you did?
ReplyDeleteThe international students may have done other work to compensate for their weakness, but it is hard to count or calculate how much. Since the assignment is a written assignment it is difficult to measure the inputs. If I was doing a paper in a different language and had trouble with the language I would ask for help. In my team project the people in my group did not ask for help, they simply submitted their parts. If these parts did not get fixed the paper in general would have been given a lower grade. Therefore, it was more of a duty to fix these parts rather than a request. It's hard to know if my grade was adequately compensated for my extra work as the professor does not publicly share the scores of others in my group.
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