MKTR project peer evaluation clarifications

Hi all,

Yesterday, I sent in the following email alongwith a form attachment:

Class,

The group project allocates equal group marks to everybody. However, this also creates a classic moral hazard problem – a few folk might choose to shirk because they figure they might get the same grade with less work. That would be unfair to those who did put in effort.

To ensure such is not the case, I am asking you to answer a simple constant-sum question and rate the contribution of your group peers.

Pls find attached a peer evaluation form modeled on what some other courses have done.

Fill it up and email it to your respective section AAs after your group has submitted its project deliverables, latest by Sunday noon. Write “peer evaluation” in your email subject line.

Of course, I totally expect the vast majority of the class groups to have found equivalent contribution from all their members. However, in case there are any seriously dysfunctional groups out there, I want to know and ensure the folks who put in the most effort are not subsidizing those who never showed up at all.

I have received a few responses. I quote a diligent, thoughtful one below:

Dear Sudhir,

This is a very good exercise, and I believe should be done for all group assignments. But I feel, the expectation for the same needs to be set in the beginning of the project.

This is very late in the game to announce this for the reasons below -

• We have not done such evaluation for any courses so far, so we’re unfamiliar with this.
• Since the groups are really independent for each course (therefore moral hazard can easily kick in.)
• Some of our team-mates are already travelling and shall be back on Monday. Many others are tied up in the exam and not able to contribute genuinely.
• There are people who show up but can do nothing without hand-holding and it is difficult to account for it in this process.
• Lastly, it is best to announce such course evaluation mechanisms upfront.

In the current light, if you plan to use this exercise only to identify negative outliers and penalize them, then it may be ok, otherwise it may become highly controversial.

E.g. in our group even though everyone mayn’t have contributed equally intellectually/ effort wise, but everyone has performed above the minimum threshold, and I would not want them to get different marks based on peer evaluation and hurt relations, because we never set the performance criteria up-front. If we had set such a criteria up-front, then we could have done that.

Pls. see if the above logic makes sense, and accordingly let us know your thoughts.

Regards

Excellente. The mail above brings up many of the points that merit clarification.

Clarifications:
1. Because different people have had different course and exam workloads, their availability might have differed. So, kindly do *not* compare contributions in literal/ratio terms, for example in hours put in or something like that. Contributions also differ qualitatively, not just quantitatively.

2. Use more of a 3-bin ordinal or categorical scale - "Met or exceeded fair share/minimum threshold", "Did not meet minimum threshold", "never showed up at all".

3. The attempt is to ID the negative outliers rather than sow discord anywhere. I fully expect the vast majority (like 90%+) groups to assess "did fair share keeping in mind different constraints" and rate peers accordingly. Ideally, the entire class rates its group peers well and saves us (the graders and the instructor) a lot of headache.

But I wouldn't want free-riding to prevail on 30% of the course grade. Free-riders if clearly identified would tend to lose upto 5% of course grade maybe, not all 30%, precisely because, as the mail mentions above, its late in the day to announce this.

The deadline for emailing the peer reviews is extended to Monday midnight. If someone does not email their peer review, I will assume all is well and they would have allocated equal points to their peers.

Hope that clarifies.

Sudhir