Taking the Guesswork Out of Assessing Individual Contributions to Group Work Assignments

ABSTRACT: This paper demonstrates how a wiki can be used to deliver greater justice in the form of a fairer grade to students who report that not all members of their group made a reasonable contribution to an assignment. While group assessment has many pedagogical and professional benefits, it is fraught with potentially unjust outcomes in terms of the marks assigned to individual students. Free-riders can unjustly receive marks for work that they have not contributed to and they may even drag down the group marks due to their non-performance. We describe how a wiki was used in an auditing group assignment to provide evidence of individual student contributions following reports of unequal contributions by group members. It was found that the wiki provided a relatively more objective basis than traditional document-based assignments to inform the decision as to whether or not all students in the group would receive the same grade and if not, how the grades should be modified.