Assessing individual student performance in a team-based engineering problem solving course

The Faculty of Engineering and Surveying at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) has introduced a series of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) courses as part of the curriculum1-3. Engineering Problem Solving 2 (ENG2102) was introduced in 2002 as part of this change and has been delivered successfully for three consecutive years. About 250 students enrol in this course annually, with over 100 students studying externally. One of the major challenges faced by examiners in such team-based problem-solving courses is how to assess individual student performance for grading 4. While some argue that teamwork should be evaluated by outcomes and that individual students should receive equal shares, there are others who believe that individual students must be rewarded based on their contribution to the teamwork. There are different evaluation techniques proposed in the literature to assess individual performance in a team-based project. Rating individual performance within and by the team members is the method evaluated in this paper. This team rating was verified by peer evaluation carried out individually by the team members. This paper evaluates the performance of teams and individual students in three different projects in the 2004 delivery of this course. There was evidence that the majority of the 40 teams (260 students) appreciated and made use of the opportunity to participate the allocation of assessment marks. Similar performance patterns were observed in all the three projects. The implementation of this rating system significantly reduced the individual complaints from the students on the assessments for this course. It is concluded that this rating method, with minor refinement is effective in evaluating individual student performance in team-based learning courses.