Group Mark Calculator

Background

When individual/paired assignment work is offered, there are some issues to juggle.

1. Pairs have "internal" administration that individuals do not have to do which adds to a student's workload within a group.
2. Hard working partners usually claim they have ended up spending more time on their assignment than they would have done working alone due to a disrupted workflow.
3. Individuals have to do all the work in their assignment, so there should be no unfairness when awarding extra marks to a hard working partner who is "picking up the slack" from their inactive member.

In industry, it is common to assign a junior developer to work with a senior developer, so it is good practice to work in a group where there is an imbalance of skills.

We have made a reasonable estimate that a student who has done all the work in a group and gets a mark of % would have got 100% in the same time and with the same effort if they had done it on their own, ie without the overhead of coordinating with an inactive partner.

We also believe it is unfair that a student that does not work should get any credit, so no work must result in no credit.

Mediation Process

Each student is asked to state simply the percentage of their contribution. If they agree on a split, there is no conflict, marks can be calculated and assigned.

If students can't agree, both have to justify to staff with detailed reasoning behind their contribution estimate. Staff will

• Check Git commits to verify student testimony on how active they were.
• Fairness of each of the student's behaviour will be taken into account, for example, was there a lot of paired programming time? Did the stronger student place an unfair stress on the weaker student?

Redemption Process

If there is work remaining for the less active student to do and the student has failed, an offer may be made by the teaching team to make up some of those marks. This would both increase the group mark and the failing student's contribution.