Unfair Peer Assessment on a Group Project

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I have just completed a 13 week group project on an undergraduate Electronic Engineering degree at a UK university. I am already an Electronic Engineer by trade and have been for 5 years since finishing an apprenticeship.

Naturally, the project came easy to me and I worked very hard. Unfortunately, the rest of my team members were underperformers and showed little ability. I took on an uneven load early on, and this only worsened throughout the project.

I was also tasked with the Team Leader role, where I also had to plan the task, write reports & proposals, cover Health & Safety etc. I tried to assign complex tasks to the team members but they were unable/unwilling and I ended up completing most of them.

At the end of the project, all teams were asked to conduct a peer assessment where each member must sign a document stating their contribution. Teams ideally split the marks evenly.

My team members are friends from previous courses and all agree to split the grade. I disagreed as I have done more work. Now, the team has stormed off and left the assessment incomplete.

I have tried to argue the case for my extra marks, by listing all completed tasks throughout the weeks and dividing up the workload. I calculate 50.29% for myself conservatively. However, the team are non-native English speakers and since the argument, have abandoned discussions.

If I do nothing, the university will default to an even split.

Is this a legitimate method of marking the course? The built-in default seems to reward freeloaders and punish hard work. Should I pursue upper management's opinion? I feel utterly betrayed by the system here.

Kind regards,

MILSPEC

EDIT-

In response to the "it's your fault" answers, I would like to provide more context. Tasks were assigned to all team members. I assigned myself less tasks than the others for the first 8 weeks, as I work full-time as a Design Engineer and the others are full time students. I used some of my time to review their work, give feedback and rework anything that needed it. I also investigated some separate hardware that could have worked (but didnt). This extra work and uneven split was agreed upon Week 1 when I agreed to be team leader (which I did not want to be).

At week 8 there was a formative assessment where the team had to stand up & present the prototype to the tutor - I was on holiday this week so the other 3 did this without any of my input. It was a tragic failure as the prototype did not work, they didn't fully understand the code and they weren't really sure how it was supposed to work. The tutor was shocked, as all the planning & proposal work had looked so good. After this, the tutor called a team meeting to discuss the problems and I was surprised to hear that the team members felt they did not have enough support from the University to keep up with the project. Basically, the students did not know how to code. All the coding tasks I had assigned to different students weeks before had been done by one of the students, and he did them poorly. This was hidden from me as the original assignee's handed the work back to me, unless they were a week late on the deadline and I would take the work back off them.

For the final 5 weeks, I took on a rapidly increasing workload as my tutor advised me to set the others simpler tasks and that I should take on the complex work. I made this clear to the team and it was agreed. The final 2 weeks I went full-throttle, took time off work and blitzed the project (and finished it).

In this dynamic, the tutor is fully aware that I have been a good team leader as she knows I assign tasks each week, provide a Google Drive for the finished tasks to be uploaded to, provide feedback to tasks and answer questions throughout the week - because we use a social media platform called Edmodo. It's like a facebook for teachers and students. Everything we have done is recorded on Edmodo, every update I post, every link, every comment. Each time I set work - it is recorded! She (tutor) has access to this aswell and sees the interactions. She has praised the team for good teamwork on Edmodo in the past.