A Method for Adjusting Group-Based Grades

Grades for assignments completed as an individual are a reflection of a student’s actual work, whereas the grade for a group assignment is easily confounded by the effects of their teammates (positively and negatively). Assigning grades to individuals for a group project is important because instructors want to assign grades that reflect effort as well as content. Since all students in a group typically receive the same grade for a group assignment, group grades have the undesirable effect of obscuring a student’s true performance. Thus, it is desirable to develop a method which could be used to more accurately reflect the true contribution of each student within a group. The authors tried using several methods to determine the distribution of effort within the teams including merit pay (a form of extra credit based on peer evaluations), team journals (where teams self report the distribution of effort), and computerized team evaluations (e.g. CATME, which won the 2009 Engineering Pathways Premier Software award). All of these methods can be used by the instructor to redistribute the group grade based on individual effort. In this paper, an automated method of adjusting the group grade is proposed and tested. A key assumption was that a team consisting of members, whom all received C’s on their individual assignments, would earn a low grade on their group work when compared to a team consisting entirely of A students (as measured by their individual grades). This assumption is based on the fact that the group work in most classes requires that the students display a mastery of the skills learned from the assignments completed as an individual. Based on this assumption, a new method was developed to adjust grades within each group based on the residual of the individual grades within the group and the portion of the course grade defined by group work. The method was tested on about 2500 student grades from a first-year engineering course. The key assumption was tested and verified. It was found that the automated grade adjustment method agreed about 80% of the time with the manual grade changes made by the instructors at the end of semester (based on journals, CATME, etc.). The grade adjustment method has strong potential as an automated tool to give the instructor a non-behavioral glimpse at team performance. It is recommended that the adjustment method only be used for flagging dysfunctional teams and not for the actual computation of a student’s course grade for several reasons. First, the method is difficult to explain to students. Secondly, students would not be able to calculate their grade without knowing the grades of their teammates (a violation of FERPA laws). Lastly, students already dislike having their grade dependent on the performance of their teammates and the proposed grading scheme would lead to a competitive rather than collaborative team environment. Introduction A method of assigning credit for group work that accurately represents individual effort within a group has been long sought out by instructors. Students also desire an equitable method of assigning group grades. Having a teammate that is a “hitchhiker” is one of the major reasons for students’ dissatisfaction with group work. The College of Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno offers a first-year general engineering course that contains a large group work component. Individual grades are a reflection of a student’s actual understanding of the course material, whereas the group grade is easily confounded (positively and negatively) by the effects of the work done by their teammates. In order to gain a true perspective of student performance for assessment purposes, the instructors of the course felt that the individual course grades needed to be adjusted to accommodate for the portion of the grade that is defined by group work. Assigning grades to individuals for a group project is important because instructors want to assign grades based on effort and content. When group work (e.g. a group report) constitutes a large portion of the final grade, the final grade may be an inaccurate measure of individual student performance. In a small class it is often possible for the instructor to deduce which students are “carrying the load” versus those that are “hitchhiking.” However, in classes with a large enrollment it is very difficult for the instructor to know how individuals are sharing the workload within each team. Thus, developing a method which could be used to more accurately reflect the true contribution of each student within a group is desirable. Over the past decade, the authors have tried using a variety of peer evaluation methods to determine the distribution of effort within at team. Adopting a corporate approach, teams were asked to allot merit pay to individual team members. The amount of merit pay was a fixed percentage of the number of points received for a group task (e.g. a group presentation). The concept of merit pay was to provide students with a realistic (i.e. corporate) and formative method of peer evaluation (a similar method is described by Clark et al.). The authors tried having team leaders distribute the merit pay as well as having the merit pay based on peer evaluations. Almost without fail, teams would distribute merit pay uniformly amongst the team members. This partly could be due to the fact that first-year students are unable to accurately evaluate their teammates cooperative skills due to inexperience, because merit pay was viewed as a competitive, and/or because students used the merit pay forms to evaluate academic ability rather than “team citizenship”. Additionally, the merit-pay system did not ask students to evaluate specific skills or behaviors and, thus, was not able to provide students with formative feedback. In an effort to institute a more formative method of peer evaluation, the authors tried using team journals where teams self reported weekly objectives, tasks and progress along with the distribution of effort for each group activity. The journals and effort reporting forms were then used at the end of the term to adjust individual grades. Again, often teams would report an even distribution of effort amongst team members (despite the fact that many individual students complained about their teammates). Unbeknownst to the authors, the team journal approach shared many commonalities with two studies published a decade before our implementation: project diaries and the “autorating” system developed at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). We also have tried using computerized team evaluations. Comprehensive Assessment for TeamMember Effectiveness (CATME), which won the 2009 Engineering Pathways Premier Software award, has been extremely effective at flagging teams and individuals that are having social or behavioral problems. CATME has the advantage of being a behaviorally anchored rating scale (BARS) and, thus, should be a more reliable form of peer evaluation than the autorating-like system previously employed. However, there still exists significant anecdotal evidence to suggest that many first-year students are not willing to give their teammates low peer evaluations. All of the methods tried thus far were based entirely on peer evaluations and have been relatively time consuming for the instructors. With this in mind, we sought out an automated method that is not based on peer evaluations to help the instructors determine if an adjustment to an individual’s grade was necessary. Methods Sampling The grade adjustment method presented in this paper was evaluated using an introductory freshmen engineering course (ENGR 100) at the University of Nevada, Reno. The course is a required multi-disciplinary first-year engineering course that is taken by all engineering majors and was developed with funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This course is taught once per year (fall semester) and has had an enrollment ranging from 200-500 students (the large range reflects growth over the past decade). Students attend a large 1-hour lecture twice a week and then break up into small sections of 24 students for a 2 hour weekly lab. The overall goal of ENGR 100 is to teach students about the various aspects of the engineering design process via completion of a semester long design project. The project requires students to work in groups that have ranged in size from 4-9 students over the past decade.