When evaluating team projects, there are a number of practices you can incorporate to make the experience more manageable for students, clarify expectations, and increase fairness. These strategies can also help to reduce student anxiety and support more effective team functioning.

These strategies include:

• Clearly defining your learning goals.
• Breaking the project grade into multiple parts so that students receive feedback at project milestones (e.g., proposal, outline, initial model, first draft).
• Recognizing progress and effort to prevent overemphasis on the final product. In large or complex projects, the final product may fall short of expectations, and yet the students often learn important skills along the way.
• Consider reserving part of the grade for individual contributions to incentivize full participation by all team members.
• Assign a teamwork grade based on components such as completing a team contract at the beginning of the project and team functioning reflections at the mid and end-points, if developing teamwork skills is one of your learning objectives.
• Consider assigning different weights to the finished product, teamwork, and individual contributions.
• Create a rubric to set evaluation standards and share it with students to communicate expectations.
• Consider incorporating peer feedback as a way for students to learn from each other and reflect on their own contributions through informal, in-class activities, or outside of class with FeedbackFruits or Canvas.
  • Students can evaluate their teammates' collaboration and contribution levels, which instructors can use to adjust individual grades.
  • Students can also give project feedback to other teams based on a rubric. This allows teams to share what they have been working on, inspire each other, and reflect on their own work after seeing others’ projects.
• Keep a set of project examples, with students’ permission to share, for future students. These examples can help students imagine what is possible for their project and can help to set high standards or provide a model for what is expected.

Ideas for Grading Individual Contributions to Project Work

Self-Reflections

Students reflect on their learning and contributions to the team and identify areas for improvement using a rubric or team contract as a guide. This gives them the opportunity to think about their strengths and weaknesses as a team member, and a framework for measuring their progress. Self-reflection is often paired with a team reflection and followed by a whole team debrief. Students can complete their reflections in formats, such as a brief written paragraph, a section within a longer report, a worksheet, or a survey. 

Statements of Individual Contribution

Students outline their activities and completed tasks for their project.

Divided Labor or Resources 

Each team member is responsible for one part of the project and is graded on their work. This may be a challenge for some projects where tasks are difficult to divide evenly.

Ideas for Grading Teams

Progress Reports

Teams write regular reports outlining what the members have been working on, what challenges the team has faced, and plans for what comes next. A progress report could also be paired with a check-in meeting with the team.

Milestones

Portions of the grade are assigned to milestones during the project, such as completing a team contract, submitting a draft, providing peer feedback to another team, etc.

Collaboration Statements 

Teams submit a document summarizing each member’s contributions to the project. All team members sign the document.  

Team-Functioning Reflections 

Students reflect on what’s going well with their team, what challenges they’ve encountered, how they’ve addressed the challenges, and what they plan to do differently moving forward. These reflections can be assigned once or twice during the project and structured as individual or peer evaluations. For example, you might ask, “What action has each member taken that was helpful for the group? What action could each member take to make the group more effective?” Consider giving teams time in class to discuss and reflect together on what their team is doing well and what could be improved. 

Project Deliverables

A team’s final product may account for a portion of the grade or the entire grade, depending on your grading criteria.