MAILING LISTS

Hi everybody:

I just went through the Grade-weight setting exercise outlined in appendix C
of the TBL book with my class.  In previous semesters I had trouble getting
classes of four teams to come to an agreement on grades, so for this
semester's nine team class I used the large-class variant.  They set their
weights individually and then entered them into an excel spreadsheet on my
computer, where I had a running average for each category set up.  The
problem is that the first team to finish entered in this:  10% individual
performance, 10% team performance, 80% team maintenance.  I think these guys
then persuaded the rest of the class to go along with them, so everybody
else quickly gave me the same weights.  I was a little flabbergasted so I
mentioned that this distribution was so crazy that a person could be really
smart, but get dinged a letter grade for being overbearing or shy.  15
minutes later they had brought the team maintenance score down to 66%, but
that still sounds really high to me.  Based on my experience the team and
individual performance is usually split more or less 50/50 with
team maintenance getting the remainder.

I tried to make the peer evaluation system simpler, no forced scoring, to
minimize problems and I am worried that is what caused the stampede.

Has anybody else run into this crazy result before?  I am a complete loss as
to what to do about it!

Thanks,
Dan Williams