Solving the group project assessment quandary: Can the instructor’s equal partitioning of each group’s topic be the solution?

Abstract

Team work is one of the generic skills that undergraduate students are expected to acquire by the time they graduate. Nevertheless, the traditional method of assessing group projects has been - in addition to its other shortcomings - sadly inaccurate in measuring individual students' contrbutions to the project. In this paper, I present a new technique for allocating group project topics and for assessing such projects, whereby the instructor - not the students in each group - divides each topic into several subtopics, to accord with the number of students allocated to each group. The new technique also obliges group members individually to upload their parts in the project to their own accounts on Turnitin, rather than jointly uploading the whole project to one account, as had previously been the case. From my perspective, the new method has to date been very successful as it addresses the shortcomings - in terms of accuracy and justice - of the traditional assessment of group projects. The attitudes of the students to the new methodology has also been positive, as evident from the results of the questionnaire distributed among the students. The methodology does, however, have various limitations, the most significant of which are the incremental time and effort done by the instructor