I’ve created this page to capture some useful information on assessing group projects. My friend and colleague Tim Katz was our guru on this topic, but he has now retired for the 3rd? time so I am trying to really run with his baton on this because his passion for it rubbed off a little on me.
We have recently published a short, ‘here’s what we did – with a bit of discussion‘ – style paper on Assessing Individual Contributions to Group Projects at the Engineering and Product Design Education 2020 – and here’s a link to that full paper.
‘A well known criticism of assessed group work is that each student receives the same team mark, regardless of individual performance.’ (quote from: WebPA project – link below)
Using our method, each student receives a grade that is individual to them.
It can be applied to any group size (e.g. 2,5,10+).
In a nutshell our method is to create a weighting factor for each student in a group based on students in each group rating themselves and other members of the group. Our method shares much in common with the Brown method mentioned below, however our approach is to add an extra layer of academic judgement to the marks.
The evaluation requires all team members to assign their partners and themselves a mark from 0 to 5 using the following table (or equivalent):
Here is an example of how the scores are input for John and Mary in a group of 2.
The rows of the table represent how an individual is evaluated, whilst the columns show each student’s evaluation of themselves and others in the team. The average of each row divided by the average of the table gives the individual weighting factor as shown below.
Here is a template that I’ve prepared which has some pre-calculated cells for several groups of 2 and groups of 3. Feel free to use or adapt this as you wish.
When multiplied by group mark this produces the individual student mark. Below shows how we have applied the weighting factor to two criteria which in turn also produces final grades that are individual to each student. Here is the excel spreadsheet to show how the calculations were applied to the each criteria. Note that typically I keep the calculations of weighting factors separate from the calculations for the group marks (mostly because it’s simpler that way).
In the paper we go into much more detail with the setup, processing and evaluation of the method. We also discuss common issues and troubleshooting. Perhaps the most important thing to note is that these weighting factors should be used as a guide, and not adopted blindly. In our opinion, we feel it is most appropriate for staff to exercise academic judgement and take professional responsibility for these grades, rather than accept the outcome of the students subjective assessments as a given. There is more discussion on this in the paper and presentation.
Here is my (draft) presentation of the paper in full (about 13 minutes):
Here is a link to the latest version of my slides: Evaluating-individual-contributions-COVILL-v7-ABBREVIATED-VERSION-visual.pptx
Here are some useful references on this topic:
- The most widely used benchmark approach: Brown R, Autorating: Getting individual marks from team marks and enhancing teamwork. Frontiers in Education Conference Proceedings. Pittsburgh, IEEE/ASEE, 1995, p3c2.15-3c2.18.
- An evaluation of the validity of the above method: Kaufman D, Felder R, Fuller H. Accounting for individual effort in cooperative learning teams. Journal of Engineering Education, 2000, 89(2), p133-140.
And here are some software systems available for group evaluations:
- An open source solution from Loughborough University: WebPA
- A commercial solution ($1/semester/student): Peer Assess Pro
