CS Team Projects
Peer Evaluation Procedure
After each major project deliverable/milestone, there will be a peer evaluation to give you a chance to assess the performance of your teammates.

It works like this:

• You are allotted (N x 100) points where N equals the total number of members in your team.
• You are to distribute these points among your teammates (including yourself) in any way you deem appropriate.
• Legal point assignments are in whole points only (so 13 is legal; 12.45 is not).
• You must use up all (N x 100) points in your distribution.

Think of the points as "effort points": Ideally, if everyone has been performing as expected, putting in their fair share of effort, you would give each of your teammates 100 points. This would mean that all team members have been doing 100% of what you expected of them. However, if you judge that a particular member (including yourself) has done more than his/her fair share of the work, then you may opt to give that person more than 100 points. Of course, this means that 1 or more of the other members will receive less than 100 points in order to keep the total points distributed at (N x 100).

Example: Suppose we have a team of 3: Sally, Bob, and Norbert. Let's say this team has been working on a requirements document that's due the next day, and Norbert called from Flag Brewery on the night before the deadline to say that he couldn't make the sweat-and-blood work session. So Sally and Bob pick up Norbert's share of the load to ensure that the document is of high quality. Here's how the ratings might pan out: Norberts rating: Norbert must distribute 300 points between team members. So he sends me his rating of: Norbert: 98; Bob 101; Sally: 101 Clearly Norbert is being unreal about his lame contribution. Then Sally sends her rating of: Norbert: 80 Sally: 110 Bob:110 This might be realistic: Sally is essentially saying that Norbert did about 80% of what she expected, and that, as a result, she and Bob had to do 10% more than their share to pick up the slack. and Bob sends me: Norbert: 82 Sally:109 Bob: 109 So we see that Bob is agreeing with Sally, and rating Norbert similarly, except he doesn't feel that Norberts failure was quite as bad From these I calculate the peer scores for all team members based on this input. Usually teams have surprisingly consistent opinions; even slackers generally rate themselves fairly (unlike Norbert above). I get very suspicious when I see someone giving themselves a high rating, when all other team members rate him/her low.

IMPORTANT: if you opt to give any team member less than 80 or more than 120 please include a brief paragraph explaining and justifying the reasons. This will help me to understand your team's dynamics. You may be contacted to explain in person in extreme cases.

Basically, it really is fairly rare for anyone to truly do less than 80% of the work expected for them. Be sure to reflect fairly and carefully; don't let personal feelings or grudges get in the way!

NOTES:

• Peer evaluations should be conducted with respect to the work that each individual was EXPECTED to complete. That is, you are grading the effort your partners contibuted, and not so much the quality of their output (that's my job). Of course, in some cases, poor quality is the direct result of lack of effort; it is appropriate for you to consider this.
• Failure to read instructions is bad. If your submitted evaluation doesn't follow the above guidelines (e.g. points don't add up to N, you don't eval one team member), I will make whatever adjustment is needed to bring it into line. This adjustment may be at your expense, so please read the above instructions carefully and check your math.