Abstract:

Higher Education is transforming as students of all disciplines are expected to have relevant technical or topic knowledge but also personal and professional skills by the time they graduate. Some of these skills are teamwork, ability to communicate and provide constructive feedback, ability to apply their knowledge within of the context of their field, etc. This is particularly of essence in engineering subjects such that students’ knowledge and abilities align with industry expectations [1]. Because of this, group work activities are increasingly used as they provide a great learning and training opportunity to students in both areas, i.e. knowledge and soft skills, as well as presenting students with projects that are more meaningful and closer to real life situations. However, the assessment of group work can be challenging, with problems particularly arising when all members of a group get the same marks at the end. Often there are “passengers” or “free riders” in the group [2], which cause general concerns among staff and students about the fairness of this method of assessment [3-5] and poor student experience. This also raises concerns with external examiners and professional accrediting bodies. A university-wide consortium (IPAC Consortium) was formed at University College London to look into this issue as it is a common problem across disciplines. Members of this consortium include academics, teaching fellows, educational experts, students and technologists.

Many of the challenges related to the engagement and assessment of group work can be addressed by the use of the IPAC methodology, i.e. incorporating an element of Individual Peer Assessment of Contribution to the group work. This method combines (a) a tutor set group mark for the outcome of the group with (b) an individual score for each student given by peers based on his/her contribution level (IPAC score). However, many academics feel nervous about giving “power” to the students to modify the marks of their peers, particularly because “mathematically and in theory” their effect can be very large.

This paper studies what the peer marks effect is in practice, and provides evidence based on several group work activities run in the academic years 2017/18 and 2018/19 in various disciplines by IPAC Consortium members. It puts current and future practitioners at ease by showing that typically the IPAC scores are in a narrow range, with only very large or very low scores in exceptional cases. The paper also investigates via statistical analysis the effect of several parameters into the IPAC scores observed, e.g. class size, discipline, previous student experience with the IPAC methodology, length of the group work, etc. We finally introduce the software that we are currently using at UCL to implement the IPAC methodology in a way that is easy and time efficient for the staff. This is of interest to anyone organizing and running assessed student group work activities, and that is using or might want to use in the future the IPAC methodology.

Acknowledgement:
The author would like to thank the IPAC Consortium members and IPAC users that kindly provided data for the analysis presented in this paper.

Keywords:

Group Work, Individual Contribution, Assessment, peer assessment, IPAC.