OLIVIER DE WECK: Assessing student work
as a team has different challenges.
Of course, the first thing you do
is assess the output of the team's work,
whether that's a requirements set,
whether it's a set of initial concepts,
whether it's a presentation that's
given at a preliminary design review,
whether it's a physical prototype that they present
as a team--
so that always should be the first thing that is assessed
is, what is the net output that the team has produced?
Within that, it is not always easy to discern
what has been the individual contribution
since the whole purpose of the team
is that the sum that comes out is greater
than the individual parts.
So in the best-functioning teams,
there is a magic that happens.
There's a synergy that happens.
There's an output that's only produced
by these synergistic interactions of all the team
members.
In a sense, trying to dissect, what's
the individual piece that everybody did,
is countering this idea of team synergy.
That being said, we also need to assess individually
the contributions and the learnings of students.
And we do this through a couple of mechanisms,
for example, a peer review.
So you can do a peer-review process.
It's trickier in smaller teams than in larger teams.
But if it's done properly, peer review
can be very effective in not only helping one understand,
who are the contributors?
And who are the free-riders?
This is always a big issue in teams,
is that the free-rider syndrome, where
some team members contribute significantly less than others.
And this often can be a source of conflict.
And so understanding this is important.
But also, have other mechanisms in the class,
such as an individual final exam, and then
the other written exam, which is administered online.
And the other thing we started doing
is oral exams, which seems old-fashioned.
But I have to tell you, in 15 to 20 minutes
of a one-on-one conversation with a student
at the end of the class, you really learn a lot.
You learn a lot about what they've
learned, where they may still have confusion
or misconceptions, and also the feedback that they give you.
So I highly recommend to do oral exams if it's possible.