Abstract

Increasingly group work forms a significant element of assessment in higher education. Two major reasons for the high rate of group work in higher education are that it develops teamwork and lessens the burden of marking time for teachers of large cohorts. However, with this increased implementation of group work comes an increased concern of how to assess each student’s individual contribution to the project in order to allocate final marks for each student. One method most often used to allocate group marks is to allocate the same mark to each member of the group. This method has invited much criticism as it does not acknowledge individual contribution to either the group process or to the product, and further, it rewards ‘free-riders’. However, the implementation of peer assessment in group work to determine allocation of individual marks has had mixed responses. The purpose of the study was to explore final year education students’ perceptions of the introduction of secret peer assessment to determine the allocation of individual student marks for a group project. It was also to determine whether the process made any difference to those individual marks.