Grading related mailbag

Two emails I received (made anonymous) and my responses therein. IMHO, bear wider dissemination:

On peer eval impact on project grading:

    Can you please let us know the weight given on peer evaluation out of the total weight of 40 marks on the group project.


    Regards
    R

My response:

    Its a maximum of 4 out of the 40 for the project.


    And it is given only if there is concurrence (2 or more people in the group have peer rated a deviation similarly). We only had a handful of cases where the criteria were met.


    Sudhir

On phase II marks allocation:

    Apoorva,


    First thing I said I am fine with the marks for phase III.


    I just rechecked the standings on the number of responses which was put up on the professor’s blog finally.

    We were placed X th out of 37 teams.

    So, we were higher than median even without considering the ISB responses and also that we were a smaller team of 6.

    Now, it was communicated earlier to us that we will be given credit only for non-ISB responses and also depending on the team size.

    So, I do not understand why we should be getting a score of 7 which is below average. Clearly we performed better than more than ½ the teams so we would expect to get well above average.

    And as the prof. has pointed himself in his blog post there is not a big variation in any component other than this we cannot afford to get less on this when we deserve credit.

    Regards,
    V

My response:

    Let me answer this one.

    1.       ISB responses were considered except where IP addresses were clearly duplicated. The large numbers of foreign and otherwise recently nonresident students in several teams would have been disadvantaged otherwise. However, ISB responses were discouraged for others and rightly so. In any case we had about 10% of the total responses from within campus – not a magnitude that would reverse the current rank order or anything.

    2.       Groups that made the minimum threshold – 10 valid responses per team member – got the baseline score of 7.  This is the vast majority of teams – 26 out of the 36 we had (Apoorva, correct me if I’m mistaken here).

    3.       The top 5 teams in the total responses sweepstakes got additional credit of 1.5. Their totals were far higher than average responses/team, the responses seemed genuine and regardless of whether or not one normalizes by team size, their output was high and thereby merited additional credit – so I deemed.

    4.       The bottom 5 teams got about 0.5 points less than the baseline 7, depending on the actuals.

    5.       Over all the average was 7.18 and you stand where you do.


    Now, while I make no claims that this particular grading scheme was perfect or anything, it is consistent and objective. IMHO, of course. Changing anything at this stage will kickoff changes for groups above yours as well as those par –the vast majority of groups there are – and will likely nullify any grade related gains one may hope to make thereby. Hence, I shall go with what is currently done.

Sorry abt the delay in letter grades release. Shall be done soon.


Sudhir