Abstract:

Universities and professional bodies increasingly recognize the educational benefits of students working in group projects. However, both staff and students have concerns about the fairness of the assessment when all the team members get the same mark. In particular, this leads to poor student experience and numerous complaints of ‘free ridders’. One increasingly popular way of addressing these concerns is via the use of the IPAC methodology, i.e. Individual Peer Assessment of Contribution to group work. The IPAC methodology allows academics to give an individual mark to students that participated in a group work activity, and this is based on their contributions as seen by their peers. This is welcome by the students Who claim are the best people to judge the contribution, tackle associated problems, and encourages student engagement and professional behavior during group work.

A working group of academics was formed at University College London to look into the IPAC methodology and identify a solution that could be implemented across the institution. After extensive conversations, it was clear that there was a general agreement among practitioners that the IPAC methodology should be used, however there were multiple views on how this should be done in practice. For instance, there are different formulas that can be used to combine the “group mark” and the “IPAC value” into the “individual marks”; different questions and scales that are used to ascertain the level of contribution; different opinions of the feedback that should be given back to the students from the available information; or even if self-assessment should be included; different moments on time when the peer assessment could take place, etc.

On the other hand, the implementation of the IPAC methodology is very staff-time consuming without a tool (3-4 full working days for an 80-students class). This includes collection of students’ views and assessment of their peers, selecting and organizing data corresponding to each student, calculating IPAC values and giving each student their individual feedback, etc. In practice, this means that without a tool to make this process efficient, IPAC is not always used even if beneficial.

Therefore, an automatic IPAC tool or software is needed, but this needs to be adaptable to the user. This paper presents some priority requirements for the IPAC tool that I identified from extensive literature reading, own experience and numerous conversations with other staff members. The paper also presents a new IPAC tool designed and developed in view of these priorities, which include extensive customization, quick and personalized feedback to students and staff-time efficiency. This paper and software is useful to any academic/teacher setting and assessing group work.

Keywords:

Group work, software, IPAC, peer assessment, assessment, feedback.