EVALUATION OF INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS IN ENGINEERING DESIGN TEAMS

Abstract

The curriculum of accredited engineering programs in Canada must culminate with a significant design experience where students must demonstrate an ability to work in teams. The determination of individual grades for work products submitted by a team is however a challenging task. To deter students from free riding on the efforts of their teammates, every team member should not simply receive the same grade. Individual grades in the senior process design course at the University of New Brunswick are determined by first assigning a team grade to team deliverables and then adjusting each team member’s grade up or down using a multiplier. The value of the multiplier is based on peer and mentor evaluations and on the level of participation of the student in course activities. The peer ratings collected in 2014-2015 are generally higher than the mentor ratings, likely because of peer pressures to give high ratings. The bias is greatly reduced however when the evaluations are normalized by dividing the rating for each student by the team average. Because of this bias, the mentor evaluations should complement the peer ratings when providing formative feedback to students and determining individual team member grades.