I would have flunked out of such a school, instead of being my class valedictorian.
Group projects and emphasizing socialization is a crutch that incompetent teachers use to force their intelligent students to do their job for them.
Group projects and emphasizing socialization is a crutch that incompetent teachers use to force their intelligent students to do their job for them.
I find the opposite true in my career. Business is 95% about how you interact with others; whether that is teaching, listening to, meeting with, understanding morale, etc.
Let's look at Agile, socialization is at the key, people over processes, scrum meetings every morning looking for who needs help and who can help, sprint meetings with product managers selling ideas to engineers and engineers discussing how it will be solved, retrospectives where everybody tries to figure out what went right/wrong and what to do better.
Then there is pair programming, which is the definition of a group project.
Group projects are a tool to adjust the average performance, without any effort on the teacher's part. The effect is more insidious than a simple numerical average would suggest because group projects introduce a time differential. Consider people as an op-amp. Their internal drive to produce a given quality is the reference voltage. What output the currently have (the progess towards the objective) is the input. When you put top performers in a group to pull up the slackers, the feedback gain of that system is artificially reduced. The good students want a certain level of quality, so they will work even harder to try an bring the quality (input signal) up to their standards. Depending on how bad the slackers are, the good student may even reach saturation, running out of hours in the day to compensate for the incompetence of others.
The incompetent teachers intuitively understand this effect. They are not fostering some kind of social nirvana, they are transferring the workload of pulling up the class average onto the bright kids. The bright kid ends up spending twice, three times as long on the group assignment, and that effort gets averaged out to the other group members' grades. The cost to top performers is all that time they could have been improving, moving forward, was stuck doing large amounts of low skill work.
With the correct group of people, all of this feel-good communication can be replaced by a handful of people that know what they are doing, keeping an online task board updated and communicating primarily asynchronously by email, or if absolutely necessary, synchronously by IM.
Pair programming is a great way to make two people half as productive as either would have been working alone.
Students benefit from explaining it to others by forcing them to clarify and solidify their own mental models; the other kids understand their peers more quickly and when multiple mental models form, the students can explain it to each other for multiple perspectives.
If it's a powerful tool, teachers should use it. Understanding is more important than grades; too many variables affect grades to make them a great predictor.
Edit: Reminder that American education is often bullshit and leaves jaded students. Just because something is useful doesn't mean our teachers use it in a way such that it is useful.
I also recommend teaching somebody something and if possible taking a class with intelligent people that is out of your element. For me, a topology course with a focus on discussion was incredible.