1. Purpose
The Peer Evaluation Guidelines: Assessing Individual Student Contributions to Group Tasks (“guidelines”) are designed to assist teaching staff to assess group assignments in an educationally appropriate way that also meets the requirements of the Assessment Policy.
2. Scope
These guidelines apply to all courses covering both award and non-award for which there is an individual contribution assessed as part of group assignment.
3. When to use group assessment?
Group assessment is often used when one or more of the following criteria are met:
- When some objectives of the subject are best achieved through students working in groups.
- Where the aim is for students to develop collaborative, cooperative and team-working skills.
- When the assessment task can only be carried out by a group e.g., where students work as a management team, or are required to assign specific roles to group members.
- When the assessment task is too large or complex for one person.
- When group skills are precisely those required for employment or research.
- When students are required to listen to others’ ideas sympathetically and critically, and to build on others’ work.
4. Lecturer responsibilities
A lecturer’s role is crucial to the success of peer evaluation. The lecturer is responsible for:
- Ensuring that the objectives and instructions for the task are clear and link to subject learning outcomes.
- Monitoring the group progress to guide students toward resolving problems.
- Dealing with issues of inequity, allocating and moderating grades and providing constructive and useful feedback to individuals and groups.
- allocating adequate class time to be devoted to the group formation, negotiation of expectations, explanation of roles, and setting times and frequencies of group meetings.
- Allocating sufficient time to build and reinforce rapport and group identity.
5. Assessing individual contributions to group tasks
When the group work component is greater than 25% of a subject’s total grade, the assessment must include individual student contributions.
The individual contribution mark is used to moderate the group mark to indicate an individual contribution. Group mark is given to the group based on the assessment criteria of the Marking Rubric (Appendix A) while the group member contribution involves peer and self-assessment using the Team Evaluation Survey tool (Appendix B).
See Appendix A and B for the Marking Rubric and Team Evaluation Survey tool.
Related documents
Assessment Policy
Review of Assessment Results Procedures
Assessment Equivalency Table