Why do we need to stop free-riding on group activities and live right?

One of the differences between high school and college is the increased frequency of group activities. To prevent free-riding, it is important to elect a group leader, divide roles specifically, and reflect contributions in grades. Living right is essential for the good of the individual and society.

 

High school and college are different in many ways. You have to organize your own schedule and move from class to class. In addition to these external aspects, there are also many differences within the classroom. One of them is group activities. Up until high school, most of my activities were solitary. But in college, you’ll be doing a lot of activities with other people. In fact, some of my current majors are project-based courses that are organized into groups from start to finish. In order for these groups to work well, everyone has to be good at what they do and work well as a team. However, there are some people in the group who work hard and others who don’t work hard and don’t participate in group activities. They think, “If I don’t do it, the others will do it,” and they don’t even do their own work well. This is what we call a free ride. They get grades without paying for it. What can be done to stop group work free riding?
There are several ways to prevent free riding. First, you need to identify a group leader who can oversee and lead the group activities. Second, it’s important to emphasize the importance of each member by giving them specific roles. Finally, since everyone’s contribution to the group will be different in the end, you should evaluate the group at the end of the group to reflect their contribution in the grade. The reasoning behind this is as follows
First, you need a leader to oversee and direct the group’s activities. That’s the role of the group leader. For example, when there is a group meeting for a group activity, if there is no leader, it is difficult to decide where and when to hold the group meeting. It’s also difficult to organize a group meeting. If the atmosphere of the group is disorganized, it can lead to a lack of motivation or members looking for a way out.
The next step is to assign specific roles. I saw a television program where a woman made a specific request of her husband, “I want the laundry hung up by 10 p.m. tonight,” and she saw that her normally unhelpful husband hung up the laundry by 10 p.m. We’ve seen this work for many families, and it can be used as a group activity to discourage free-riders. This is where the need for facilitation comes in. For example, it is important for the group leader to meet with the group members and define their roles, not just say, “Let’s write a research plan together” or “Let’s work really hard,” but to set specific times and roles, such as, “You have to write your part of the project by midnight on Saturday and post it in the chat room.”
Lastly, it is important to evaluate the group members after the group activity is over and reflect their contribution to the group activity in the group grade. This can help ensure fairness by differentiating between those who got a free ride and those who worked hard on the group activities. You can also discourage free riding by announcing in advance that you’ll be evaluating members. However, you need to be very careful with these evaluations. Most people will be honest in these reviews, but not all people are good. The last thing you want is for someone to abuse the system to pick on someone, or to play with someone’s grade by making up things that never happened.
Free-riding on group activities is a common problem in college. It can be especially stressful for freshmen who are new to college. Therefore, policy support is needed at the school level to prevent free-riding and create fair groupings. For example, schools can provide guidelines for group activities and organize workshops for students to learn about different ways to address the problem of free riding. Professors should also provide clear evaluation criteria for group activities and set up a system to objectively assess students’ contributions.
Group work is a shared activity, and it is morally right not to take a free ride and work hard for yourself and your group. It is not an obligation, but a consideration to work hard in group activities. If we extend this to our daily lives, we can ask, “Is there a reason to live right?”
In the end, my answer to the question, “Do we have a reason to live right?” is yes. I believe that living rightly is good for us in several ways. First, from a utilitarian perspective, I believe that living rightly is a more utilitarian act. For example, if you’re walking in the park and you have an empty bottle from a drink, you can do two things. If I choose to throw it on the ground, I benefit because I don’t have to carry the bottle around, but everyone else will be offended to see it lying on the ground as they walk by. The bottom line is that throwing an empty bottle on the ground is an act of lowering the axiom. If you do the right thing by throwing your soda bottle in the trash when you see the trash on the ground, thinking about the people who will be offended by it, you may inconvenience yourself a little bit, but in the end, you’re raising the utility of the whole society. I think this is why we should live rightly, because right behavior increases the utility.
This is not the only reason why we should live rightly. Another reason is that humans are social animals. As social animals, we can’t live alone. Every single action we take, even the ones we do without thinking, is connected to other people. Being a social animal is also important when we think about the communication hypothesis from the book The Emergence of Altruism. The communication hypothesis states that humans communicate with each other, which leads to altruistic behavior. If we don’t live right, we become less and less communicative with other people, and thus less and less social animals. This is not good for the individual or for society as a whole.
The final reason why I think we need to live right is that if we start doing things that are not morally right, this will only get worse. As the saying goes, a needle in a haystack becomes a cow in a haystack, and I believe that immoral behaviors that start out small can escalate to the point where they can cause serious harm to others and even lead to criminal behavior. For example, a person who has always been unclear with people around him or her about their financial relationships may become more serious and commit fraud. Therefore, it is important to live right from the smallest details.
These are the reasons why we should live right. You may think that doing something wrong is good for you, but it’s only good in the short term. We should live right because it is ultimately more beneficial for us to live right when we think about the long-term benefits that will come to us. It is also important that we all work together to live right because right behavior has a more positive impact on society.
For these reasons, we should live right not only for our personal benefit, but also for the good of society as a whole. Living right is not just a choice, it is an essential effort to build a better society. Therefore, we should always choose the right behavior and consider the impact of our actions on others.