Evaluating individual contribution toward group software engineering projects

It is widely acknowledged that group or team projects are a staple of undergraduate and graduate software engineering courses. Such projects provide students with experiences that better prepare them for their careers, so teamwork is often required or strongly encouraged by accreditation agencies. While there are a multitude of educational benefits of group projects, they also pose considerable challenge in fairly and accurately discerning individual contribution for evaluation purposes. Issues, approaches, and best practices for evaluating individual contribution are presented from the perspectives of the University of Kentucky, University of Ottawa, University of Southern California, and others. The techniques utilized within a particular course generally are a mix of (1) the group mark is everybody's mark, (2) everybody reports what they personally did, (3) other group members report the relative contributions of other group members, (4) pop quizzes on project details, and (5) cross-validating with the results of individual work.