Should students pick their own teams, or should you assign them?
Self-selection feels fair and saves you work. Here is what it quietly costs, and when assigning teams is the better call.
Hari B · Founder · July 2026
What self-selection actually optimises for
Letting students choose their own groups optimises for comfort, not for good teams. People pair with who they already know, which rewards students with an existing network and leaves newer, quieter, international, and commuter students to take whatever is left.
It also clusters ability. Strong, well-connected students find each other, and the students who most need a functional team often end up in the weakest one.
What assigning teams gets you
Assigning teams from real inputs, availability, skills, and a few stated preferences, spreads strengths so no team is set up to fail, and gives students who lack a network a fair shot. The cost is that it takes effort to do well, which is why so many courses fall back on self-selection.
The middle path most courses actually want
You do not have to choose between a free-for-all and ignoring what students want. The approach that works is to assign teams, but let preferences be one input among several. Students get a voice, and you still guarantee no one lands in a group with no shared availability or a lopsided skill mix.
When self-selection is fine
In small, tight-knit cohorts where everyone already knows everyone, self-selection does little harm. The larger and more diverse the class, the more it costs, and the more assigning teams pays off.
The reason coordinators default to self-selection is that assigning good teams by hand is genuinely tedious. Teamer removes that cost: it forms balanced teams from student inputs, respects a reasonable share of their preferences, and hands you draft teams to review before anything is published.
If you are weighing this up for your own course, get in touch and I will share how other coordinators have made the call.
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