This is one of the most common methods, and a lot of people like it. It does have a flaw, or challenge, though, however you want to put it, which relates to John's concern about the Fink method: it punishes team members with no 'bad' teammate to 'dump' low points on. If my team of 6 has a team member who I believe was very low quality, I might assign my 50 points along the lines of 12, 12, 12, 12, 2. But if I have no especially poor team members, then I might assign scores of 11,10,10,10,9; all of those individuals would have gotten a higher score if they were on a team with a poorly-performing member on it. Yet it is not our goal to award points/grades based on whether people happen to have a poorly performing team member.

I never noticed this until a student pointed it out to me, but since then I have switched to a straight series of Likert scales with no tolerance for unrealistically high or similar ratings (they must re-do the eval with a penalty assigned to their own score). This also helps focus the rater's attention on specific learning behaviors (were they on time, did they teach concepts to other team members, were they only performing class-related activities during class time, etc.), possibly decreasing the extent to which their simple liking-or-not of the person influences their scores. (I have no evidence for this, though).

Of course, any method has positive and negative aspects, and we have to use something.

Sarah Leupen
Biological Sciences
University of Maryland, Baltimore County



On Fri, Apr 7, 2023 at 3:28 PM Neil Haave <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
I have been using the same method as Molly for the last 10 years. It has worked well for me.

Neil

On Fri, Apr 7, 2023 at 11:30 AM Molly Espey <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I only use a final peer evaluation to weight the overall team average for the contribution to each individual’s final grade. I use a midsemester peer evaluation for students to get an idea of how it works and how it might influence their grade, but only the overall final evaluation counts.

 

I use the method where each student has points equal to ten times the number of teammates they have, and they have to allocate all of the points in evaluations but cannot give everyone a ten. In a team of six, for example, everyone has 50 points to allocate among their 5 teammates. At least one person will get above 10, at least one below, and some may get a 10. The average is used to weight the team score for each individual with a max of 100% provided for that portion of the individual’s grade. I also request comments to support the evaluations given.

 

Molly Espey, Professor

John E. Walker Department of Economics

312H Wilbur O. and Ann Powers Hall

Clemson University

Clemson, SC 29634

 

Tiger_CB__copur

 

 

 

From: Team-Based Learning <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Carter, Neal
Sent: Friday, April 7, 2023 12:16 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Peer evaluation guidance

 

Hi John, I have a few of questions for your consideration. Could you simply use the iRAT scores as the adjustment for quizzes? If they are scoring high or low on the iRAT, would that be enough to provide the accountability you seek? My understanding

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Hi John,

I have a few of questions for your consideration.

  1. Could you simply use the iRAT scores as the adjustment for quizzes?  If they are scoring high or low on the iRAT, would that be enough to provide the accountability you seek?  My understanding was that peer evaluation scores would be used to adjust complex applications or be treated as a separate grading category.
  2. Could you set upper and lower bands on how they can rate anyone who showed up for the RAT?  (For those absent, I let my students choose what % of the team score to give the missing member without affecting the team score.  I encourage them to set their own rules on how this will be handled, such as requiring notification if they won’t be there or number of times they get a pass.)
  3. Could you establish a rule that no one will receive more than 100% or 105% of what the tRAT was worth?

Hope this helps!

Neal Carter

Professor of Political Science

Brigham Young University—Idaho

 

From: Team-Based Learning <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of John Gotwals
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2023 1:59 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Peer evaluation guidance

 

Hi all,

I’m looking for some peer evaluation guidance.

I use peer evaluations to adjust students’ averages across the team quizzes. I use the Fink Method to conduct this adjustment. This is where the ratio of the student’s average peer evaluation score and the team’s average peer evaluation score is multiplied against their average across the team quizzes.

This works great, except in cases where there is one team member that gets a peer evaluation score that’s much, much lower than their teammates. This pulls down the team average and results in the person with the low evaluation taking a big hit on their team quiz score while the other team members get a big boost (sometimes adjusting their team quiz scores well above 100%).

To deal with this I’ve thought of treating the team member with the really low evaluation as an outlier, removing their score from the adjustment calculations, and just applying a set deduction to their team quiz average. The challenges with this approach are:

  • What criteria do I use to identify outliers? How much lower do their peer evaluation scores have to be from those of their teammates?
  • How much of a set deduction should I apply?

Has anyone else dealt with this issue? Any suggestions or thoughts? I’m all ears!

Thanks,
John

 

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