Individual Marking or Group Marking?

[Deleted]

Hi

I'm honestly just making this thread to assuage my ego. I'm studying at a fairly well regarded British university in my first year, and I've had two group presentations thus far. In the first one based on International Business, there was individual marking and I got 81/100 in that. I also did fairly well in the essay and got 78/100. 70 is what you need to get a first class in the UK.

In the second presentation based on Economics there was another presentation, and this had group marking. In this one, I and the rest of my group got 65. So, basically a 2:1.

I put the exact same amount of effort and dedication into both presentations, and my workshop tutor also found my performance in this one to be rather good (he also teaches at UCL). He also personally went on record during our last session that he thinks group marking is unfair as opposed to individual marking.

In both presentations I had relatively non-serious group members. In this one in particular we barely had three meetings to plan out our presentation and we had only one rehearsal session.

I'd be very interested in hearing what other university students and educators here on the forum think of this debate. Which method do you think is better?

NOTE: My group members are extremely happy about their result, added to the fact that we beat everyone else in our seminar by 7 marks. The overall highest mark was 75 outside our seminar. They're mainly Oriental Asians, which is what Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese people are called in the UK. Last time, I had a Russian, a Lithuanian and a Chinese person. I'm not upset about the final grade, mind you, primarily due to the fact it's about 20% of the grade for this subject.

[I Push Buttons]

I prefer to be scored on my own performance and not the performance of other people.

[Independent voter]

In the real world you're often going to have to work in a group so much so that employers have asked educational institutions to include more team based work.

You can't develop a new antibiotic on your own.

[Endus]

Okay, so you're in university. This is a school for adults, and you're treated that way.

When you're doing group work, you're going to be marked based on what your group produces. It isn't about effort, it's about product. Because that's how the real world works. Nobody cares how hard you worked on something, if it's poorly executed in the end. All they care about is that poor execution.

If you don't think your group had enough meetings/rehearsals, why didn't you push for more?

I'm going to assume you're in undergrad, based on how you phrased this, but what's going on here is that you're learning that university (and the employment world, by extension) isn't like secondary school. It isn't there to coddle you. If you group failed to produce a good presentation, you failed to produce a good presentation. It doesn't matter if you did three times as much work as anyone else in your group.

If they were slacking and not participating, you need to see the professor, to ask if you can produce something solo, or the like, so you can get that individual consideration. If you don't see the prof, they have to assume everything's fine.

I'm in grad school, in a professional-track program, and my "projects" for my studios have been actual work for actual real-world clients, outside the university. If someone slacked off and didn't get something done, then that reflected badly on all of us, which meant that if that happened, I'd step up and do their work myself. Because I'm not going to half-ass a piece of work for a client with the excuse of "well, I did my part, okay?" The most recent studio, my group had 4 members, and every other group had 5; same type of project. That meant we each ended up putting in about 20% more hours on the work (tracking hours was part of the project, to get an idea of billing parameters, so that's not a guess, either) than anyone else. We didn't complain. We produced a high-end bit of product that our clients were incredibly pleased with, and which they're now basing policy on moving forward. Because that's how real life works. It isn't about your individual effort, it's about the product you produce.

[Deleted]

Okay, so you're in university. This is a school for adults, and you're treated that way.

When you're doing group work, you're going to be marked based on what your group produces. It isn't about effort, it's about product. Because that's how the real world works. Nobody cares how hard you worked on something, if it's poorly executed in the end. All they care about is that poor execution.

If you don't think your group had enough meetings/rehearsals, why didn't you push for more?

I'm going to assume you're in undergrad, based on how you phrased this, but what's going on here is that you're learning that university (and the employment world, by extension) isn't like secondary school. It isn't there to coddle you. If you group failed to produce a good presentation, you failed to produce a good presentation. It doesn't matter if you did three times as much work as anyone else in your group.

If they were slacking and not participating, you need to see the professor, to ask if you can produce something solo, or the like, so you can get that individual consideration. If you don't see the prof, they have to assume everything's fine.

I'm in grad school, in a professional-track program, and my "projects" for my studios have been actual work for actual real-world clients, outside the university. If someone slacked off and didn't get something done, then that reflected badly on all of us, which meant that if that happened, I'd step up and do their work myself. Because I'm not going to half-ass a piece of work for a client with the excuse of "well, I did my part, okay?" The most recent studio, my group had 4 members, and every other group had 5; same type of project. That meant we each ended up putting in about 20% more hours on the work (tracking hours was part of the project, to get an idea of billing parameters, so that's not a guess, either) than anyone else. We didn't complain. We produced a high-end bit of product that our clients were incredibly pleased with, and which they're now basing policy on moving forward. Because that's how real life works. It isn't about your individual effort, it's about the product you produce.

In terms of product, I basically made the poster myself and sent it ahead of time to the course tutor. He said it was a good poster, so I took that at face value.

Insofar as why I didn't push for more, well, I wasn't the group leader so I didn't see it as my responsibility to get them together. I was the leader last time though. It might have been wrong of me, but there it is.

Also, they had legitimate reasons for not getting together as they had to focus on another essay for Organisational Theory which was 50% of the grade for that subject. I had that one finished two weeks early and got early feedback on it, so...

But thank you for the input. It does put things in perspective.

[TrumpIsPresident]

Group grading teaches an important lesson about life.

Slackasses drag down the collective.

[zebreck]

Nothing does as much to educate you about the fundamental, inescapable unfairness of adult and work life as group projects. There are no referees or judges calling fouls and handing out gold stars for your contribution, because nobody gives a shit about anything beyond the finished product. If you have bad people in your group you're expected to use your grown up social skills and fix it yourself.