Peer Assessment for Undergraduate Teamwork Projects in Petroleum Engineering

This paper presents an analysis of the peer assessment data used to derive individual marks for teamwork projects assigned in four petroleum engineering courses. The collected data represents a wide range of groups composed of international and local students, male and female students. The analysis emphasises peer assessment as a viable tool for evaluating individual contributions, as long as human bias is adequately minimised for fair assessments. We applied the normalisation factor technique to address biases. The study demonstrates that poorly performing students in the groups can be identified by utilising peer assessment. However, to be successful additional judgement is required from the lecturer, based on the observation of team dynamics. It was determined that a significant number of students (about 40%) gave the highest marks to peers for all assessment criteria; in particular a high proportion of the international students in our study were more generous than the local peers. In four groups out of 22 groups, all team members gave the highest rates to each other for all criteria thus severely undermining the peer assessment process. All these observations underline the necessity to give students adequate training in the method when using peer assessment; and care needs to be taken when groups are formed to enable effective group dynamics.