In my econometrics class, a huge portion of our grade is decided by a group project in which we write an academic paper about something in the real world that is of interest to us, with the goal of applying econometric methods to the real world. This process, thus far, has been extremely rewarding but, a couple of weeks ago, as we approached our first deadline, it became clear just how much of a problem academic free riding would be.
The night of our first deadline, when we needed to submit an annotated bibliography containing analysis of the literature that we would be building off of, three of our five group members were missing in action. They had not made any changes to our shared document and, apart from one who later joined (albeit in a very limited fashion), they did not even respond to our messages asking for their completed work for our submission. Eventually, two of us completed the assignment and we received a perfect score, which was given to all group members, including those who did little or no work. In short, those group members were acting as academic free riders.
While there are several proposed solutions to this issue, I would advocate for a percentage of each group member's grade to be decided via peer grading. That way, group members could levy a penalty on those who free ride (a lower grade), which would hopefully be enough to disincentivize free riding. Until then, though, I may be forced, as my incentive to score well is higher than my incentive to free ride, to, along with one of my peers, continue to do more than our fair share of the work for this project.
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