“The success or failure of the project, division, or company is the “team grade”. Regardless of how good your contribution was, the bonus or layoff that you get depends on the overall success or failure which is largely dependent on others’ contributions.”
That’s not true in most high tech companies, bonuses are tied to your individual contribution as well as meeting or not meeting group goals. Managers get a lot of feedback on who contributed little vs who drove the project. Let’s say you release a product successfully and the mgr or team lead gets $50K of bonuses to divide up, they’re not going to give 5K to ten team members equally.
“At the college I attended, students were usually encouraged to do engineering problem sets in groups”
That may be true for Stanford but not for most other engineering majors. I was reading an article a few years back and it made a good point on the two flaws of engineering education in the US - 1. every problem has a cut and dried answer with only one or two ways to solve it and 2. you can only solve that problem by yourself. I think it’s improving esp in the upper level courses but typically freshman calculus is a weed out course and you’re not getting graded as a group in that class.
Anyway back to the OP, grading on a test high school does seem a little odd, especially for an AP class. I can see group projects, labs but a test does seem to take the common core too literally.