It is possible to grade students on the basis of work which they have completed as a group (e.g. a group project submission or report). The teacher is, however, required to have some mechanism to differentiate the individual students’ contributions (it is not required to precisely weight each student’s contribution — only to address pronounced differences in contribution).
There are a number of strategies that can be used to identify such pronounced differences and to differentiate grades if required (each of which have some strengths and weaknesses):
- Group submissions can be accompanied by an oral presentation which allows teachers to question each team member on their contribution.
- Each student can be allocated a task in the group and can report on that specific task.
- The group submission can be accompanied by a (shorter) individual submission which allows each individual to demonstrate their own grasp of the material.
Groupwork is often intended to assess both technical knowledge and transversal skills (such as team leadership or project management). Different components of a submission can be used by teachers to assign a weight to transversal as well as technical skills taught in a course (for example, an individual report may be used to assess a student’s learning on project management, while technical knowledge may be assessed through the group submission).
It should be noted that grades are awarded by the teacher and so students cannot be used for peer grading within teams. Peer feedback from one student to another remains, however, a valuable learning strategy.