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Yes, and it was a disaster. Kids didn't get the grades they deserved. I would come up with a reason to set a ceiling on peer maintenance, e.g. The dean would kill you

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-----Original Message-----

From: Daniel Williams <[log in to unmask]>

Sender: Team-Based Learning <[log in to unmask]>

Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2011 18:06:07 

To: <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-to: Daniel Williams <[log in to unmask]>

Subject: Grade setting exercise



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