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