I understand this topic has been beat to death because Psych is probably one of the most popular courses for first years and so my question isn't that in depth because I've gone over some of the other threads about it already.

The group assignment..
When I read the review of Psych 1X03 by Davey, I read about a group assignment, however, other members have discussed group essays.

The essay aspect is quite frightening because...to combine the grammatical and writing styles of several people into one cohesive piece seems more like an editing task than a writing one.

Any feedback on this portion of the course would be appreciated; your opinions or your experiences would be super.

Thanks a ton

My group read the articles before meeting up and prepared discussion. We wrote our rough draft while discussing the articles. Then we edited it and added stuff, cut stuff out, etc.

The entire time we only had one person actually typing the assignment. I know it sucks for that person, but we decided to do it that way so writing styles don't mix and it allows the assignment to flow nicely.

Group essays are a hit or miss. It really depends on how hard your group is willing to work. We split up it amongst us evenly because we sectioned it up by headings. Then we put it all together and took turns editing it until we were all satisfied. It's all about group dynamics!

The essay is not that hard to write, but I found that it was marked pretty hard. However they do give you an option to resubmit your work and os your mark could increase a little.

Make sure you get a good group for the group essays.

When 1A03 was still around I was on a group with people who didn't seem to know how to use spell check and tried to use wikipedia as sources. Since they handed their parts in the day before it was due, I ended up redoing their parts. This is the same with any group project, I guess. Unless they've changed it for the new course, you get to give in a peer evaluation of your group members which accounts for part of the mark.

From what I've heard, the essays are marked hard.

How do groups get chosen?
Is it based on people in the tutorials?

Yes, you choose people in the tutorial. For my tutorial, we got to choose our own groups.

My tutorial in 1st year got our groups assigned to us, and the essay was marked extremely hard. It sucked. :(

It depends on your group, depends on what TA marks it, depends on workload during the time, but you can definitely manage. Takes a lot of collaboration!

yeah it really does depend on the ta. for 1xx3, (I know you asked about 1x03) my ta hated our group writing style but we did well with the actual marker. though this is to our benefit, it is kind of annoying that it is this way and there is no clear standard. Also, psych has weird marking system sometimes, for example, there are presentations in 1xx3 (again, i know you asked about 1x03 but it's run by same people). The presentations are out of 10, and my TA said she was instructed as a guideline that each group has to have a difference of at least 1 mark between the groups (even if they are equally good). If there are 5 groups, that can really suck. My TA didn't follow that rule but some probably did.

That is a really stupid rule >.>