Depends entirely what the group is for. A group that reads together is a waste of an evening. A group that does a timed block separately and then compares wrong answers for half an hour is worth a lot.

Ours was the second kind and it was the only social contact I had in October, which mattered more than the studying did honestly.

i did mine entirely alone and passed. do not join a group out of guilt lol

Like tbh I usually found them helpful during article but we made this bigger one with more people for the bar prep and it honestly turned into like a two hour daily chat about articling for every single week. Lovely people but zero studying lol. So your MMV. Depends on the type of people in it too.

One thing a group is properly good for that nobody mentions: someone else explaining a topic you have read four times and still do not get. Ten minutes of that beat two hours of rereading for me.

So for example we deliberately formed a group around each others skills. So we had a real estate person, a crim person, a wills and estate person. Like I was the Civ pro person and took all the classes until 3L (evidence, advance Civ pro, etc….) and so I would explain the rules of Civ pro to my real estate buddy and he would explain all the crap about undertakings and insurance that I otherwise would never understand lololol 😂

So TLDR I recommend you hand pick who is on your group based on a mix of interests that covers the subjects, it honestly helps so much