To Chris’s comment – It sounds like your first try at collaboration was voluntary, but I may be reading between the lines. If it was, and it was successful, the experience would impact your future willingness to collaborate. I’m curious about what convinced you that collaboration was necessary, though. I’ve done many classes with group assignments and it is not uncommon to have problems with free-loaders. Even when individual grades were pro-rated according to group evaluations (you lost points on your group grade if everyone in your group said you contributed poorly), there seemed to be a belief that no one would actually dare to downgrade them, at the student or teacher level. What helped convince you?

There are some cases that are different though. One of my computer science courses in college required pairing with another student for the whole semester. (The intention was that the workload was so heavy, you would divide the work amongst the two. We chose pair programming instead and had an easier time than the rest of the class.) Other classes required significant collaboration as well.

In these cases, we were still competing for grades, but at least within the project team, we were co-dependent for our success and therefore had to learn to collaborate well. I found these experiences invaluable and did my best work when collaborating with others.

Chris