DarrkPhoenix: It's all just a matter of having the group properly managed, and having people who can actually be counted on to get their part of the work done on time. Unfortunately, through all levels of school these things tend to be in pretty short supply, so it's not surprising that group work often ends up being a pretty miserable experience.
Yeah well, despite my earlier success story, I do have the other kind as well. You say "through all levels of school", but in my experience it gets better the further along your particular education you get. I have an education as a "datamatician", a Danish construct that is slighty less than a bachelor in CS, and is taken at a business school. The way it worked, financially, is that the school got paid by the government on a "by student" basis, so the number of students starting each year determined the amount of money they got. As a result, they took in a lot of students who really had no business being there in the first place. People who didn't really know what they wanted to do, but they liked playing computer games, so maybe a computer education would be cool. In the first semester, my class had close to 50% dropouts. You can probably imagine what group work was like in that environment. However, by the third semester all the natural dropouts had been culled from the herd, and so I had the group work experience I outlined earlier.
