And you got the 6 points because SOMEONE had to pick up @kenrodoff’s slack!

I like the idea of having each person grade the group members. Will students see which peers gave which grade? Do you think this will affect how they grade each other?

Let me know how this works for you. I may try your variation, thanks.

Not sure what I did to get 6 points though, I think you did all of the work!

@kate: That sounds a lot like me – rather shoulder the load than let my grade suffer. I hate seeing it happen to my students, which is part of the impetus here. Also, since starting my grad degree, I’ve had to become more comfortable with spreadsheets, graphs, and numerical data – who knew?

@david: I wonder if there’s a difference in how elementary & high school students view “equitable distribution.” Although they’re often justified in their grievances, sometimes they can get nitpicky as hell (e.g., “he typed one paragraph less than the rest of us”) – oy vey…

@jose: I’d be interested to hear how you improve upon this. Drop a line to compare notes if/when you make some changes!

In group projects in my classroom, I usually have the kids just write a sentence or two about how much each group member contributed. Of course, I don’t need to be as quantitative in elementary school.

I love the use of spreadsheet for this, i’m a spreadsheet junkie, probably my accounting background Seriously, this is an area I’ve always had a problem with as well, both as a student and a teacher. I was the student who did most of the work and often saw my group members get equally good grades – here’s me crying NO FAIR! On the other hand, maybe I was a bit controlling and didn’t LET other group members do the work b/c it wasn’t as good as what I could do? That’s what I think about when I’m watching my students work in groups and you’ve provided a great way to assess. Then there’s the next level of collaboration – the workplace……….contributions never fair and never recognized:-) Guess that’s the meaning of “there’s no I in team”? BTW, I hate that saying!

@jeff: Good points – I’ve given some thought to that, and I’m not sure how the kids could “work” it unless they all conspired to screw one student, which would likely set off my BS alarm. As for the rubrics – neat idea, and I’m of two minds about it: on the one hand, allowing all the scores from 8/9 up to “pool” as an A may discourage students from taking over the project – in other words, I’d be concerned about encouraging some of the misguided overachievers to take over and not allow others to contribute (sounds weird, but I’ve had it happen before) in the name of grade hoarding. On the other hand, I could see differentiating the A grade a bit more: perhaps F, D, C, B, A-, A, A+? What did you have in mind? I’d be interested to see.

I’ve used something similar with my English classes, but even with this type of system, I still have kids waiting after class to complain that group members didn’t contribute equally!

Sometimes, they just want their voices heard.

one flaw i wonder about, one tweak.

flaw – what would happen once kids get used to this system? is it possible that with some student populations they’d learn to game it? prisoner’s dilemma?

tweak – i teach middle school and we’re all about the rubrics. i think that this would fit better with some sort of descriptive rubric than with letter grades. that way, instead of topping out at an “a”, you could go more into depth with the categories. for example, in that sample chart you have it looks like mctoonish’s “a” was more deserved than those of kenrodoff or jackieb. with a descriptive rubric, you could throw some superlative adjectives at mctoonish and let krod and jackalack know that they’re not yet at the top of their game.