My solution is to have teams decide during one class meeting on a subset of their team that consists of members who have attended class at least half the time in the last month. The subset might be the entire team or just a portion--whatever the team members decided during that class. The members of the subset are then instructed to only evaluate other members of the subset. I make all students take home identical lists of who is in the subset to write up their peer evaluations online. (I also make the teams make extra copies of the subset for students who were absent.)

On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 8:28 AM, Jennifer Imazeki <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I'm curious if/how others make adjustments to numeric evaluation
scores when there are teams with huge variation within them. That is,
I have a couple of teams where there are students who have basically
'dropped' the course but not officially - that is, they are
technically still enrolled (and may show up on RAT days) but otherwise
they are NEVER there so not surprisingly, their teammates gave them
very low scores on the mid-semester evaluations. But because they have
a fixed number of points to distributed to the team, that means they
give the other team members significantly higher scores than the class
average (so the missing student has an average score of around 2 but
some of the other students have average scores WELL above 10). In
contrast, I have a couple of teams where everyone is solid and
contributing and so everyone has very similar scores, all close to the
average. I use the evaluation scores as a weight but it seems sort of
unfair that the students in the first team have weights that are
disproportionately higher just because they have one team member who
is a total slacker.

Any advice/thoughts on how to deal with this situation?

thanks!
Jennifer