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I usually do not tell students about this ahead of time. They read it to
themselves on the last day of class and figure it out and quietly do what I
ask. In the past, I made the mistake of giving the team evals out to fill
out outside of class. One team simply ignored me and gave everyone equal
scores. Another team cleverly figured out a way to give equal points by each
agreeing to make one of the others the low-pointer and, so they all ended up
with equal scores anyway! I had to give them credit on that one. I am not
bothered by rule-breaking, so I accepted their decisions/choices. AS others
have pointed out, if the teams bond and everyone does truly contribute
equally in their view, then the lesson has been learned. usually, when there
is clearly someone who does less work, they are more than happy to give
points accordingly.

  _____

From: Team Learning Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Don McCormick
Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 11:32 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Forced Ranking in Peer Evaluation


Hi TBLers

I teach management and I used the peer evaluation form that requires
students to rate their peers and give at least one a "9" (which is one below
average) and one "11" (which is one above average). When I announced it last
night, the class exploded in a revolt, objecting that it wasn't fair because
"in my group everyone did an equally good job of contributing," they
couldn't figure out a basis for rating others one way or another, etc.


I know the form says "If you give everyone pretty much the same score you
will be hurting those who did the most and helping those who did the least,
" but I also am sympathetic to the students' point of view.

I understand the reason given above for forcing some minimal ranking and I
also realize that students are often terrified of giving negative feedback
to other students. I want to help them learn to overcome this fear because
they need to learn how to give negative feedback in the workplace. If they
don't learn to do this, they will truly suck as managers. But it isn't clear
that in the cases where they genuinely feel each person in their group has
contributed equally how forced ranking will help them learn this.

Is there more to the requirement of forced ranking that I am missing? From
your point of view, what is the learning objective that this helps students
to meet?

- Don
---
Don McCormick
Department of Management
College of Business and Economics
California State University Northridge
https://www.csun.edu/~dmccormick/Don%20McCormick/Home.html