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Anonymous self evaluation and peer evaluation

Please evaluate each group member's contribution (including your own), using the following scale. Please do not attempt to evaluate the "quality" (or academic merit) of the contribution — that's what the marker will be doing! Your evaluation should be based on each member's level of participation, effort, and sense of responsibility, i.e., the degree to which each member fulfilled his/her responsibilities (e.g., did this student attend team meetings (if any), make a serious effort at assigned work, notify teammates when he/she was unable to attend a meeting or fulfill a responsibility, listen to ideas and opinions respectfully and give them careful consideration, generally cooperate with the group effort, attend course lectures and tutorials, etc.)

• outstanding (+20%): contribution = solved and wrote up the entire assignment, more-or-less (use only in exceptional circumstances)
• above average (+5%): obvious extra effort (consistently went beyond what he/she was supposed to, was well prepared and cooperative)
• average (0%): effort more-or-less as expected (usually did what he/she was supposed to, was acceptably prepared and cooperative)
• below average (-5%): obvious lack of effort (consistently failed to do what he/she was supposed to, was unprepared and uncooperative)
• inadequate (-20%): contribution = filled out the cover page, more-or-less (use only in exceptional circumstances)

You are strongly encouraged to discuss this with your group members ahead of time: the goal is to get everyone to contribute and to agree on how much of a contribution each of you made — not to have someone try to get a "free ride" and then have everyone else complain! In particular, "outstanding" and "inadequate" should not be used unless something goes very wrong and cannot be fixed — and in the (hopefully) unlikely event that this should happen, this mechanism will allow credit to be given where it is due.

To avoid the possibility of a disgruntled group member trying to "take revenge" on someone else by submitting bad evaluations for them, and to encourage you to discuss and agree on your evaluations ahead of time, any large discrepancy between the evaluations submitted for one group member by everyone else will result in me contacting everyone involved (individually) to find out exactly what happened. This is not a threat (even though it may sound like one): it's just how I plan to resolve conflict within groups — and hopefully, it will never actually come to that with any group.

Submit your evaluation as a plain text (ASCII) file named "evaluation.txt", with your full name and student number, followed by your evaluation of each group member (don't forget to include yourself), in the form of a rating from the scale above together with a short (one sentence) commentary to explain your rating (see below for a fictional example). Use either CDF's 'submit' command or email to the instructor. This submission is "anonymous" in the sense that your group members will never directly be told the evaluation you submitted.

Every group member's ratings will be combined, using a (not so) secret formula and rare alien technology, to adjust everyone's individual grade — either up or down is possible. More precisely, each rating is assigned a percentage value as in the list above. Then, for each group, (1) for each student i, compute A_i = the average of all evaluations submitted for student i, (2) compute M = the median of the averages for students in the group (if the number of students is even, take the middle value closest to 0, or 0 if both values are equally close), (3) the adjustment for each student i is then A_i - M, as a percentage of the grade obtained on the assignment.

Example

Suppose Alice R. Student and Bob L. Somebody complete their assignment and that Alice comes up with the main idea of the answers for each question and also writes one of them up, while Bob only writes up the other two answers (but both of them are much longer than the one Alice wrote up). Then they may agree that both contributions were average — even though Alice came up with most of the ideas, the actual workload was shared fairly, and the goal of the peer evaluation is not to rate academic ability, just good teamwork — in which case Alice's and Bob's "evaluation.txt" file might look like this:

Alice's "evaluation.txt"

Full Name: Alice Student
Student Number: 111222333
CDF/UTOR email: a.student@utoronto.ca

Alice Student: average
I spent more time coming up with the answers, but wrote up only one of them.

Bob Somebody: average
Bob spent his time writing up more of the solutions.

Bob's "evaluation.txt"

Full Name: Bob Somebody
Student Number: 123123123
CDF/UTOR email: b.somebody@utoronto.ca

Bob Somebody: average
I put in a lot of time writing up the two long questions, although Alice is the one who worked out the ideas.

Alice Student: average
Alice figured out the solutions and then wrote up the short one, which was a fair trade.

The adjustments for Alice and Bob would then be computed as follows, assuming that their grade on the assignment was 60/80:

On the other hand, if Alice feels that she contributed her fair share but that Bob did not contribute as much because the write-up for his questions was sloppy and still contained many small errors that they had previously discussed and agreed to correct, while Bob feels that his contribution was average because he took a fair amount of time out of his busy work schedule, and they can't agree on this, they may submit files that look like this:

Alice's "evaluation.txt"

Full Name: Alice Student
Student Number: 111222333
CDF/UTOR email: a.student@utoronto.ca

Alice Student: average
I did my fair share of the work: figured out all of the answers and wrote up one of them.

Bob Somebody: below average
Bob wrote up the other two questions, but he did it too quickly and was very careless and sloppy.

Bob's "evaluation.txt"

Full Name: Bob Somebody
Student Number: 123123123
CDF/UTOR email: b.somebody@utoronto.ca

Bob Somebody: average
I put in a lot of time writing up the two long questions, although Alice is the one who worked out the ideas.

Alice Student: average
Alice figured out the solutions and then wrote up the short one, which was a fair trade.

The adjustments for Alice and Bob would then be computed as follows, assuming that their grade on the assignment was 60/80:

Since this is a small discrepancy, I would not contact Alice and Bob to find out what happened, and Bob would end up losing 2.5% of his mark on the assignment.