Assessing Group Participation

Spring 2022

Overview

Periodically, you will each be asked to evaluate the relative contributions of your team members toward the project effort (including design, implementation, writeup and presentation). The results of these evaluations could lead to members of a team receiving different final grades for the semester. The basic idea is that you'll allocate a fixed "budget" of points across the group. Your allocations will be combined with the allocations from the other members of your team to produce an overall estimate for each member.

More specifically, you will each be given 100 points to divide among the N members of your team, including yourself. Allocate points based on the proportion of the credit you feel each member deserves. You may consider quality and quantity of contributions, attitude, and/or any aspects that you feel are relevant. You must give yourself at least 100/N points, whether you feel you deserve them or not, though only your teammates' estimates of your participation are included in your average. Thus, it is important that your teammates recognize the value of your contributions.

Your final grade will be determined by multiplying the team grade by an adjustment factor that ranges from 85% to 115%, based on the participation scores from your peers. (Half the expected participation leads to an adjustment of 85% while twice the expected value gives 115%.) Limiting the adjustment factor to this range avoids the degenerate case where the members all give themselves the full 100 points, and assumes that a likely range of contributions is "half as much" to "twice as much". This simple approach breaks down in extreme cases (such as where a member does virtually no work), but those situations can be handled on an exceptional basis. Contact me if you think more extreme measures are appropriate for your team.

Instructions

Each time an evaluation is performed, please do the following:
  1. Visit the online folder containing templates for each project and make a copy of the spreadsheet for your team.
  2. Find your name on row 10 of your spreadsheet and fill in the column below it, making sure you give yourself at least 1/N of the 100 points. (In a five-person project that would be 20 points, etc.) Distribute the remaining points among teammates as you see fit.
  3. Share your spreadsheet, containing only your ratings, back to me.
Your individual ratings will always be kept anonymous. If I see teams where the consensus is that one or more members are underperforming, I will start by emailing the group as a whole and suggesting that the team might want to have a discussion about balancing their workload, but I will not identify any particular members as being over- or under-achievers.