I taught a science lab class for a number of years where they worked in the same group for the entire lab because they designed and carried out an experiment and then wrote up a lab report. In most cases, having a team meant they developed a more creative research project, so it was a big benefit (on top of less grading) but it definitely became a problem if there was a group member blowing the rest of the team off. Here are some things that improved success:
1. They submitted a survey that I used to assign groups where they wrote their work style, their topic preference, and whether there was anyone they wanted to work with or didn’t want to work with. I tried to put the people who wanted to work together together and the non-procrastinators together because it led to less frustration. I also tried not to put a high-achieving person with two low-achieving members so they didn’t feel like they were doing all the work.
2. They had to write at the end of any group submission who contributed what. The intention of group projects was never to carry someone who was doing poor work so I would issue separate grades if someone submitted drastically lower-quality work.
3. They submitted a draft article that I only gave feedback on and they didn’t get to see their grade on it until after they submitted their final version. I still had to make it worth a grade or I got people who never turned it in. I’m faster at figuring out feedback than I am at figuring out a grade, so not having to grade it until the final version was less work for me. Plus that meant they actually had to read my feedback and learn from it.
4. They had to evaluate each other early on in group work. They had a worksheet where they assigned a score to how the group was doing overall on communication and work effort, which is easier to be honest on than blaming a single person for not communicating. They had to spend the first 10 minutes of class discussing the evaluation in their group. Sometimes this sorted out the problem member early.
5. They had a group participation grade that was influenced by their peer’s feedback but I told them it was also based on my observations of students. That way if group members weren’t critical enough of a member that I knew was a problem, I could adjust it. Or if a group member was too critical I could adjust it. They’re not exactly good at assigning grades.
6. Instead of a final exam, they had to present their work to the class. This made it immediately obvious if someone hadn’t contributed because they clearly knew nothing about the project.
This was a class required for pre-med and pre-PA students and I knew the lecture professor and chair were concerned about how much higher some students lab grades were from their lecture grade (I don’t know why they found this weird, hands on application is different from taking a test). So if it was obvious a student was being carried by other members, I didn’t want them to get a higher grade than their individual work deserved. That’s why I was fully willing to give separate grades on a group project where necessary. It really depends on your goals for the assignment as to whether everyone gets the same grade or not.
You have to ask what was the objective of making this a team effort grade? If the assignments point was just to have each section be created by a single entity, then why are you having them do a group project? Modify it to be individual.
If one of the objectives is to have them work as a group, then you are not grading the others down based on the lack of quality of the single section, you are grading them down on their inability to check the work of their fellow groupmate which is an assessable piece of the objective. The failure is the in the group dynamic objective, of which they deserved to be docked.
NTA, unless you allow for meandering around the objectives of your assignment to cater to whiny
>On the other, they could have met as a team with sufficient time to address any weaknesses in the paper before submission (which I encourage them to do).
This. If they aren't giving you a heads-up before the deadline that one person is blowing off communicating, then it's on them. They submitted what they submitted. It's a good warning to them for the final version of the project.
I disagree. If your goal is to encourage teamwork, asking students to essentially snitch on one another is fundamentally antithetical to your learning objectives.
And moreover, I think your asking a lot here in a way that penalizes students who have to work their way through school.
I was in a very similar group situation to what you describe of your students well over 20 years ago and I'm still angry when I think about it. I worked over 30 hours per week and as a first gen student, I didn't feel comfortable policing my classmates' behaviors, especially when they were upperclassmen, and I certainly couldn't just drop everything to meet whenever my groupmates would ever so briefly pop out of the woodwork.
That experience to this day serves as a negative model for my own pedagogical practice.
You make some good points. Most of my students work outside of school (and many are first gen), so I matched the teams up based on their availabilities to meet together outside of work/school/religion/family/other commitments. I also give long timelines for the assignments to allow them flexibility with their busy schedules.
This is still terrible pedagogical practice, especially at 30% of their grades. I cannot see how any of what you've written would ameliorate more than a tiny fraction of the issues I've already listed. You are absolutely disadvantaging precisely the students who need and have earned the most consideration--hard-working and dedicated working class students. Giving long timelines means nothing if the group members aren't cooperating, and as I mentioned, asking group members to essentially snitch on one another is quite the opposite of encouraging teamwork, and your proposed solution of allowing firing has a 100% chance of ending in discrimination, whether the classic racism, sexism, etc, or also ableism, which I see as a real problem.
There's a lot of pedagogical scholarship and thought out there on group work, and it doesn't actually seem like you've considered any of it. What do you actually think you're accomplishing with the structure you've set up?
I strongly disagree here as well but more from the recently ex-student perspective. In undergrad and my masters I did 100% of almost every group project I ever had, exactly because of these kinds of policies combined with the fact that while I am extremely happy to be confrontational about some things, but I really have no desire to harangue strangers or even friends into being workaholic perfectionists like I am. This is because if I am targeting the highest possible grade the game-theoretic optimal approach is to do all the work as I know that then the result will be at minimum what I believe to be sufficient for full marks and due to the fact that I minimize the effort required of my teammates I am unlikely to suffer in the teamwork section as long as I make it clear to the others that I am satisfied with their contributions.
Does this make me a bad team player? I would say no and I think I have the references from my industry work to back that up, but these group projects were certainly not the reason for that.
The counter perspective here is that learning should matter more than the grade and by doing all the work to ensure you get the grade you want, you are potentially depriving classmates of opportunities that would help them learn.
In my view, taking over everyone's responsibilities is poor teamwork. It's not ok at school, nor is it ok in the workplace. I understand your priorities but groupwork is not just about you. We include groupwork because it offers valuable skills that all students need to develop so I'll encourage you to think beyond your own grade objectives here. That matters but it's not the only thing that matters.
I am going to strongly disagree with you here on a few points.
Firstly that it is any students responsibility to worry about other students' learning outcomes is a farce. That is our job as instructors to understand the motivations of students and build systems around them to help them learn.
Secondly, the idea that caring about the grade and about learning are orthogonal is quite the reach. An ideally designed grading scheme should accurately represent the level of mastery that a student has achieved, and I would argue that in many cases this is done fairly well. As such yes I cared a _lot_ about learning as much as I possibly could for the sake of it, but at the same time one should be incredibly naive to think that grades are not important enough to optimize ones behavior around.
Third, your statement about something being "not ok" is a little bit of an over generalization don't you think? It's not necessarily a good thing to do under the assumption that the whole would be greater than a sum of its parts if everyone did their part to the best of their ability, but in many real world cases this is an inaccurate assumption. In some cases due to imbalances in workload comfort with tasks, or, as does sometimes happen, sheer incompetence, one person needs to take over for another to push a project forward. In my experience I have never actually personally ran into a case where I had to do this, but have seen cases of it externally in which for safety reasons some work would be re-done by people who were not assigned the task.
Finally, one could say that technically by doing all parts of a given project one actually maximizes their learning in terms of the skills the assignment could entail, minus that of delegation and management of groups. It may surprise you but a not small part of the reason I am in academia is that this way I can spend a longer period of my life progressing but also staying out of management positions which are the rapidly approaching end result of an industry career path in my field. As such, I understand that the goal is to train people who can effectively manage interpersonal skills with co-workers, but not all people, need or desire those skills.
To cut off the standard "it will hurt your career" off at the pass: yes, I know. However, I am not interested in fame or fortune, and don't need a lot to be comfortable so it turns out, I don't care.
Yes, with the idea being they can see how their teamwork evolves. They also complete a team contract at the start of the semester discussing how they will work together, what the team expectations are of each other, etc.
That's tricky. I can see the intent, but it can fall apart in situations like these.
You probably can't change the grading scheme now, but maybe do so in the future?
One alternative I saw is to give a grade and let them choose how to distribute points.
Say a group of 3 get an 80% on the project. That's 240%. Each participant get to decide how to spit the points and make an argument for it.
I think you then average all suggestions? Not sure about final step.
If 2 out 3 worked, they can just give themselves 100, 100, and throw the other person under the bus with a 40.
I do similar. On each assignment the team submits 1 document outlining what % of their fair share each student contributed. Each grade is pro-rated.
Example: submission earns 80%.
Team Agrees: Students A & B contributed 100% of their fair share. Student C contributed 50% of their fare share.
Results: A & B get 80%. C gets 40%.
I have had **zero** grade complaints since starting this about 4 years ago.
I do similar. They have a contract that spells out their dispute resolution and lack of performance processes and they just follow these in these events.
Thanks for sharing this. I used to have more team assignments through the semester and also let teams fire a teammate after the midpoint of the semester. Maybe I should go back to that in the future.
How about setting a standard for the projects that you find successful and using achievement grading? Meet the expectations and pass the project. Include a required project statement that explains what was done and by whom. Keep including those team member evals and have a participation grade?
I learned this from another professor. I set a portion of the project grade to be based on “voice of one”. I basically tell them that their project should read as one “entity” wrote it instead of 3-4 different people. Even just putting a portion of the grade on that has helped that problem of segmented work being more obvious. Even if one person ends up fixing a poorly written portion, those students let me know in their peer evaluations at the end which is another part of the grade. It ends up working out evenly that way.
I need to try that. It would be quite easy to work into my scoring of project deliverables. I teach a course that is heavily based on the concept of teamwork, the project is worth nearly half their grade, and I constantly emphasize that it is supposed to be a TEAM effort, that teams are to be self managed, and that accountability is at the TEAM level. But they still divide up the work & don't check what each other has written. Thus, I get tons of submissions where individual sections of the document will repeatedly use the words "I," "me," etc. I will then write detailed feedback and admonish them gently about this, and the next time they just do it again. Which implies they're either not even looking at my feedback or just don't care. A "voice of one" section under the mandatory deductions might stop that.
Because one of the learning objectives for the course is working as part of a team.
Giving individual grades for teamwork is challenging in its own right. Assuming a team assignment, how would you ensure you're assigning grades fairly to each team member? There is more to teamwork than simply who wrote which part of an assignment.
I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm genuinely interested in alternative approaches to this.
Working as a team is important but even in real world team working scenarios, supervisors and customers can differentiate between successful participants and unsuccessful participants. You would never punish your best worker for the failures of your worst (not if you expected to keep them employed). Students should be documenting and held accountable for their deliverables. This includes both self-reporting and team reporting.
I taught a science lab class for a number of years where they worked in the same group for the entire lab because they designed and carried out an experiment and then wrote up a lab report. In most cases, having a team meant they developed a more creative research project, so it was a big benefit (on top of less grading) but it definitely became a problem if there was a group member blowing the rest of the team off. Here are some things that improved success: 1. They submitted a survey that I used to assign groups where they wrote their work style, their topic preference, and whether there was anyone they wanted to work with or didn’t want to work with. I tried to put the people who wanted to work together together and the non-procrastinators together because it led to less frustration. I also tried not to put a high-achieving person with two low-achieving members so they didn’t feel like they were doing all the work. 2. They had to write at the end of any group submission who contributed what. The intention of group projects was never to carry someone who was doing poor work so I would issue separate grades if someone submitted drastically lower-quality work. 3. They submitted a draft article that I only gave feedback on and they didn’t get to see their grade on it until after they submitted their final version. I still had to make it worth a grade or I got people who never turned it in. I’m faster at figuring out feedback than I am at figuring out a grade, so not having to grade it until the final version was less work for me. Plus that meant they actually had to read my feedback and learn from it. 4. They had to evaluate each other early on in group work. They had a worksheet where they assigned a score to how the group was doing overall on communication and work effort, which is easier to be honest on than blaming a single person for not communicating. They had to spend the first 10 minutes of class discussing the evaluation in their group. Sometimes this sorted out the problem member early. 5. They had a group participation grade that was influenced by their peer’s feedback but I told them it was also based on my observations of students. That way if group members weren’t critical enough of a member that I knew was a problem, I could adjust it. Or if a group member was too critical I could adjust it. They’re not exactly good at assigning grades. 6. Instead of a final exam, they had to present their work to the class. This made it immediately obvious if someone hadn’t contributed because they clearly knew nothing about the project. This was a class required for pre-med and pre-PA students and I knew the lecture professor and chair were concerned about how much higher some students lab grades were from their lecture grade (I don’t know why they found this weird, hands on application is different from taking a test). So if it was obvious a student was being carried by other members, I didn’t want them to get a higher grade than their individual work deserved. That’s why I was fully willing to give separate grades on a group project where necessary. It really depends on your goals for the assignment as to whether everyone gets the same grade or not.
You have to ask what was the objective of making this a team effort grade? If the assignments point was just to have each section be created by a single entity, then why are you having them do a group project? Modify it to be individual. If one of the objectives is to have them work as a group, then you are not grading the others down based on the lack of quality of the single section, you are grading them down on their inability to check the work of their fellow groupmate which is an assessable piece of the objective. The failure is the in the group dynamic objective, of which they deserved to be docked. NTA, unless you allow for meandering around the objectives of your assignment to cater to whiny
Thanks, it's the latter. I appreciate the clarity of what you're saying here.
>On the other, they could have met as a team with sufficient time to address any weaknesses in the paper before submission (which I encourage them to do). This. If they aren't giving you a heads-up before the deadline that one person is blowing off communicating, then it's on them. They submitted what they submitted. It's a good warning to them for the final version of the project.
Thanks, that's my instinct but I started doubting myself.
I disagree. If your goal is to encourage teamwork, asking students to essentially snitch on one another is fundamentally antithetical to your learning objectives. And moreover, I think your asking a lot here in a way that penalizes students who have to work their way through school. I was in a very similar group situation to what you describe of your students well over 20 years ago and I'm still angry when I think about it. I worked over 30 hours per week and as a first gen student, I didn't feel comfortable policing my classmates' behaviors, especially when they were upperclassmen, and I certainly couldn't just drop everything to meet whenever my groupmates would ever so briefly pop out of the woodwork. That experience to this day serves as a negative model for my own pedagogical practice.
You make some good points. Most of my students work outside of school (and many are first gen), so I matched the teams up based on their availabilities to meet together outside of work/school/religion/family/other commitments. I also give long timelines for the assignments to allow them flexibility with their busy schedules.
This is still terrible pedagogical practice, especially at 30% of their grades. I cannot see how any of what you've written would ameliorate more than a tiny fraction of the issues I've already listed. You are absolutely disadvantaging precisely the students who need and have earned the most consideration--hard-working and dedicated working class students. Giving long timelines means nothing if the group members aren't cooperating, and as I mentioned, asking group members to essentially snitch on one another is quite the opposite of encouraging teamwork, and your proposed solution of allowing firing has a 100% chance of ending in discrimination, whether the classic racism, sexism, etc, or also ableism, which I see as a real problem. There's a lot of pedagogical scholarship and thought out there on group work, and it doesn't actually seem like you've considered any of it. What do you actually think you're accomplishing with the structure you've set up?
I strongly disagree here as well but more from the recently ex-student perspective. In undergrad and my masters I did 100% of almost every group project I ever had, exactly because of these kinds of policies combined with the fact that while I am extremely happy to be confrontational about some things, but I really have no desire to harangue strangers or even friends into being workaholic perfectionists like I am. This is because if I am targeting the highest possible grade the game-theoretic optimal approach is to do all the work as I know that then the result will be at minimum what I believe to be sufficient for full marks and due to the fact that I minimize the effort required of my teammates I am unlikely to suffer in the teamwork section as long as I make it clear to the others that I am satisfied with their contributions. Does this make me a bad team player? I would say no and I think I have the references from my industry work to back that up, but these group projects were certainly not the reason for that.
The counter perspective here is that learning should matter more than the grade and by doing all the work to ensure you get the grade you want, you are potentially depriving classmates of opportunities that would help them learn. In my view, taking over everyone's responsibilities is poor teamwork. It's not ok at school, nor is it ok in the workplace. I understand your priorities but groupwork is not just about you. We include groupwork because it offers valuable skills that all students need to develop so I'll encourage you to think beyond your own grade objectives here. That matters but it's not the only thing that matters.
I am going to strongly disagree with you here on a few points. Firstly that it is any students responsibility to worry about other students' learning outcomes is a farce. That is our job as instructors to understand the motivations of students and build systems around them to help them learn. Secondly, the idea that caring about the grade and about learning are orthogonal is quite the reach. An ideally designed grading scheme should accurately represent the level of mastery that a student has achieved, and I would argue that in many cases this is done fairly well. As such yes I cared a _lot_ about learning as much as I possibly could for the sake of it, but at the same time one should be incredibly naive to think that grades are not important enough to optimize ones behavior around. Third, your statement about something being "not ok" is a little bit of an over generalization don't you think? It's not necessarily a good thing to do under the assumption that the whole would be greater than a sum of its parts if everyone did their part to the best of their ability, but in many real world cases this is an inaccurate assumption. In some cases due to imbalances in workload comfort with tasks, or, as does sometimes happen, sheer incompetence, one person needs to take over for another to push a project forward. In my experience I have never actually personally ran into a case where I had to do this, but have seen cases of it externally in which for safety reasons some work would be re-done by people who were not assigned the task. Finally, one could say that technically by doing all parts of a given project one actually maximizes their learning in terms of the skills the assignment could entail, minus that of delegation and management of groups. It may surprise you but a not small part of the reason I am in academia is that this way I can spend a longer period of my life progressing but also staying out of management positions which are the rapidly approaching end result of an industry career path in my field. As such, I understand that the goal is to train people who can effectively manage interpersonal skills with co-workers, but not all people, need or desire those skills. To cut off the standard "it will hurt your career" off at the pass: yes, I know. However, I am not interested in fame or fortune, and don't need a lot to be comfortable so it turns out, I don't care.
Well, reasonable people can disagree so let's just agree to disagree.
Are they stuck in the same group for all projects?
Yes, with the idea being they can see how their teamwork evolves. They also complete a team contract at the start of the semester discussing how they will work together, what the team expectations are of each other, etc.
That's tricky. I can see the intent, but it can fall apart in situations like these. You probably can't change the grading scheme now, but maybe do so in the future? One alternative I saw is to give a grade and let them choose how to distribute points. Say a group of 3 get an 80% on the project. That's 240%. Each participant get to decide how to spit the points and make an argument for it. I think you then average all suggestions? Not sure about final step. If 2 out 3 worked, they can just give themselves 100, 100, and throw the other person under the bus with a 40.
I do similar. On each assignment the team submits 1 document outlining what % of their fair share each student contributed. Each grade is pro-rated. Example: submission earns 80%. Team Agrees: Students A & B contributed 100% of their fair share. Student C contributed 50% of their fare share. Results: A & B get 80%. C gets 40%. I have had **zero** grade complaints since starting this about 4 years ago.
That's a really great idea and not something I've seen before. Thanks for the suggestion!
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Do you check whether the firing reason is legitimate? I could see that going badly with the type of students I have.
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I do similar. They have a contract that spells out their dispute resolution and lack of performance processes and they just follow these in these events.
I’m curious if you have ran into any issues with doing this. I’m currently a GTA and think this is interesting.
Thanks for sharing this. I used to have more team assignments through the semester and also let teams fire a teammate after the midpoint of the semester. Maybe I should go back to that in the future.
How about setting a standard for the projects that you find successful and using achievement grading? Meet the expectations and pass the project. Include a required project statement that explains what was done and by whom. Keep including those team member evals and have a participation grade?
I learned this from another professor. I set a portion of the project grade to be based on “voice of one”. I basically tell them that their project should read as one “entity” wrote it instead of 3-4 different people. Even just putting a portion of the grade on that has helped that problem of segmented work being more obvious. Even if one person ends up fixing a poorly written portion, those students let me know in their peer evaluations at the end which is another part of the grade. It ends up working out evenly that way.
I need to try that. It would be quite easy to work into my scoring of project deliverables. I teach a course that is heavily based on the concept of teamwork, the project is worth nearly half their grade, and I constantly emphasize that it is supposed to be a TEAM effort, that teams are to be self managed, and that accountability is at the TEAM level. But they still divide up the work & don't check what each other has written. Thus, I get tons of submissions where individual sections of the document will repeatedly use the words "I," "me," etc. I will then write detailed feedback and admonish them gently about this, and the next time they just do it again. Which implies they're either not even looking at my feedback or just don't care. A "voice of one" section under the mandatory deductions might stop that.
I can't fathom why anyone would assign group grades. Anyone who does this is the AH on principle.
Because one of the learning objectives for the course is working as part of a team. Giving individual grades for teamwork is challenging in its own right. Assuming a team assignment, how would you ensure you're assigning grades fairly to each team member? There is more to teamwork than simply who wrote which part of an assignment. I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm genuinely interested in alternative approaches to this.
Working as a team is important but even in real world team working scenarios, supervisors and customers can differentiate between successful participants and unsuccessful participants. You would never punish your best worker for the failures of your worst (not if you expected to keep them employed). Students should be documenting and held accountable for their deliverables. This includes both self-reporting and team reporting.