Every Australian who has sat through a university group project knows the feeling: the late-night messages to a teammate who has gone quiet, the frantic rewriting of someone else's section the night before submission, the quiet fury of watching an equal grade go to someone who contributed almost nothing. Shadow education minister Julian Leeser has decided that feeling deserves a policy response.
Speaking at the Universities Australia Solutions Summit, Leeser made a pointed appeal to vice-chancellors and academic leaders across the country, calling on them to eliminate group assignments from their curricula unless there were genuinely compelling reasons to keep them.
"There is always that student who does the work, and that student who reaps the benefit. It diminishes the role of the individual. In most cases, there is no compelling justification."
Leeser's argument centres on individual accountability. He contends that group assessments, as commonly structured, do not accurately reflect what any single student knows or can do. The result, he says, is a form of academic inequity baked into the system: diligent students subsidise disengaged ones, and the grade awarded tells employers and institutions very little about the individual sitting behind it.
His call has resonated with many students, and it is easy to see why. The frustration is not merely anecdotal. The design of most group assessments places enormous social and emotional burdens on those who care most about the outcome, creating a dynamic that rewards free-riding and penalises conscientiousness.
The research picture, though, is more layered than Leeser's framing suggests. A 2023 study published in Studies in Higher Education, conducted by researchers at Australian Catholic University, found that students themselves recognised meaningful benefits in collaborative group work, including the development of communication skills, exposure to different perspectives, and preparation for professional environments where teamwork is unavoidable.
Educators and learning designers would likely add that the problem is rarely group work itself, but rather how it is assessed. When universities attach a single shared grade to a project without evaluating individual contributions, they create exactly the inequity Leeser describes. But well-designed collaborative assessments, which include peer evaluation components, individual reflection tasks, or staged submission requirements, can address many of these concerns without abandoning the learning outcomes that group work is meant to achieve.
There is also a broader skills context worth considering. Graduate employers across Australia consistently rank communication, collaboration, and the capacity to work in teams among their most sought-after attributes. The Department of Education and various industry bodies have long emphasised employability skills as a core expectation of tertiary education. A blanket removal of group work could address one legitimate grievance while inadvertently creating another: graduates who have never been formally assessed on the skills most workplaces demand from day one.
Teachers across the tertiary sector report that the real issue is under-resourcing. Designing and marking group assessments fairly takes considerably more time than marking individual essays, and in an environment of growing student-to-staff ratios, many academics default to blunt instruments because they have no practical alternative.
Leeser's push also arrives at a moment when universities are already under pressure to address concerns about academic integrity, with AI-generated submissions adding fresh complexity to how assessments are designed and verified. Individual oral examinations, practical demonstrations, and invigilated written tasks are all gaining renewed interest among academics precisely because they are harder to game, with or without artificial intelligence.
The honest answer here is that neither a wholesale ban nor an uncritical defence of the status quo serves students well. The legitimate concern Leeser has raised, that individual performance should be fairly and transparently assessed, is one most educators would share. The question is whether a blunt instruction to eliminate group assignments is the right tool, or whether the focus should be on lifting assessment design standards across the sector, investing in the staff capacity to implement them properly, and ensuring students have genuine recourse when group dynamics break down.
For students who have spent sleepless nights carrying a team across the finish line, the shadow minister's words will feel like long-overdue recognition. For academics who have seen the genuine intellectual growth that well-run collaborative work can produce, the call will raise concerns. Both responses are reasonable. The task for universities, and for whoever holds the education portfolio after the next election, is to take the complaint seriously without flattening the response into a simple ban.