A team centered grading system based primarily on the team's performance

One of the current expectations of industry requires universities to provide technically competent engineering professionals capable of immediate assimilation into a team-based working environment. The only practical means of affording students a team-based learning experience involves having students function as a team member in a course(s) taken during their college experience. One of the major challenges of using student teams focuses on providing the student team with some definite "reward" for their collective performance while ensuring the integrity of individual learning. Without a grading component serving as a team "reward", little incentive exists for students to participate fully and learn the underlying concepts, skills and synergistic potential associated with being a member of a high performance team. This paper presents a method for course grading based primarily on the student team's performance. It resulted from numerous attempts to have students accept "ownership" for developing the method of determining the course grade because a basic principle of the team concept is to create a sense of job ownership. The paper explains how each team member's individual performance is integrated with the team's performance to produce the final course grade. The final course grade received by the student is weighted so approximately two-thirds of it results from the team's effort with the remainder derived solely from the student's individual performance.