Team work in Academic study - what do you learn from it?

I have heard about it a few times; according to the academic thinking, team works and group assignments develop students' skills to work as a team with other classmates. I am sure that it sometimes does that. However, in many cases, the experience to work as a team with classmates is terrible: some of the team-mates are not motivated to study, some are not capable intellectually. The frequent unproductive team meetings consume a lot of your previous study time, which you could otherwise employ to do your own individual assignments or do more readings by yourself. What is worse, all the other good quality classmates could have been reserved by other classmates and you are left to work with the incapable ones. As a result, your academic performance and learning process is much spoilt by these incapable and uncommitted classmates.

Another problem is the conflict arising from the peer assessment of team-member contribution to group assignments. If the whole idea of group works is to promote team spirit, then why would students be subsequently asked which student has done more work than others, thus gains more marks than his/ her fellow team-mates?

I think students should be free to elect to work as a team or to work alone in assignments in case they could not find acceptable team-mates to work with. In this, case, students can choose  to do a group assignment or do an individual assignment.

As a teacher, I am very sympathetic to students who are forced to work with uncommitted and incapable students as a team on group assignment... it is unethical and it is inhuman in this case.