Team Grading

Group projects are (despite student beliefs) quite a headache as a teacher. Without being there for the inner-workings of each of the groups, it's difficult to fairly and accurately assign points.

How do you know who's caring the burden of the work?

How do you fairly grade?

Well, one strategy I'm trying for the first time is what I call "team grading." Here's how I did it:

I divided the total project points - 50 assessment points - into two categories. I allotted 30 of those points to the group presentation my students were working on. This grade will be the same for every student and I'm considering this their achievement grade.. The remaining 20 points are where they will team assess. This will be their effort grade. I gave the following directions to my students:

Your responsibility is to justly, fairly, and with the best interests of your teammates at heart, divide the points based on who did the work for this presentation. There are a total of 20 points per person (so if your group has 5 members, 5x20=100 points, or 6 members =120 or 7 = 140).

Rules:

1.       You may use no more than your total points, but you can use less.

2.       If you can tell the person did not read, they cannot receive more than 15/20 (75%).

3.       Everyone who participated (even if they did not meet all their responsibilities) must get at least 10 points.

4.       Only if someone was never a participant can you give them a zero.

5.       Be fair and reasonable. 

There were some interesting responses that I received. I forced students to complete this grading together, but I had one group with some serious animosity toward one another. After getting an insincere response from them, I gave them each an individual sheet to fill out. This garnered much more realistic responses and helped me get to the heart of what had happened to create their negative group dynamic.

You can access the full document for downloading on my dropbox.