Response here because off topic elsewhere.
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The Japanese have also complained their rote learning approach to education does not foster creativity. At the risk of racism, Asians have an advantage in a more collaborative culture.
Employer's frequently complain university graduates here are not accustomed to working well with others hence for decades I used group projects in all classes with a heavy weighting of about 30% toward the overall grade. Experience showed the better students hated it and perhaps the poorer ones took advantage
That was my experience in student group projects. Basically one, maybe two students would carry the weight and the others would be freeloaders. I've been on both sides; I started out being the one carrying the weight and after enough of them, realized I was wasting my time and energy and switched to being a freeloader. Except on projects I actually cared about (i.e. which meant more to me than the class itself did), where at least once I filed a "minority report".
so I built in an evaluation by peers as part of the overall grade for individuals.
...which doesn't help much if you don't structure it very carefully, since the freeloaders usually claim that they did the work and downrate the person who actually did the work. Who usually attempts to be generous to the freeloaders.
For projects which actively require more than one person, it's better to structure projects with a clear leader and followers, and then they can be rated on leadership / followership skills. The problem of encouraging actual *collaboration*, as opposed to *assistance*, is substantially harder. I'd say most student group projects break either due to trying to do true cooperation rather than leader/followers, or over who's going to be leader. You only get true cooperation if people actually want to cooperate, and you can't force it.
My colleagues despised that, ever protective of their exclusive power over the grade.
I think most really successful creative people build on others' work.
Of course, and the best have many collaborators. You can't force it though. You have to simply *allow* it. Allow any student to submit *any* project as a joint project with someone else, and *require* giving credit to anyone whose work helped. But don't require collaboration, since that doesn't work. Many of the best professional collaborations have been between people who weren't in the same organization or who were in wildly different branches of the same organization, but who were "sympatico", interested in the same topic.
A few of my favorite papers I wrote as a student had collaborators who weren't even in the same class. I cited my collaborator, after telling the teacher what was happening and asking permission. But the fact is that this is heavily discouraged for students by the academic system, which pressures students to do all their work "themselves" most students wouldn't get permission or wouldn't think to ask for it.
This is probably training students in bad habits which will serve them poorly in the future -- either encouraging them to *not* collaborate, or worse, encouraging them to *deny credit* to their collaborators. (I had a few professors who attempted to push back on this by talking to people about how it was OK to get help and crucial to cite your help.)
(If you really need to see whether a student can do work solo, give them a proctored test, either written or oral. Other work should permit collaboration. I realize this is radical.)
Of course in the case of the Nobel for uranium and the double helix, the research publication and hence the award ignored contributions by women in both cases. I'm sure there are other contrarian examples.
