Some refinements on peer assessment of group projects

As the demand for group projects in higher education has increased in recent years, it is necessary to device an assessment method that results in fair grading of project group members. An attempt has been made to apply an existing peer assessment approach from Goldfinch to engineering student group projects. The results confirm the validity of the approach. However, the existing approach has a number of problems owing to the inevitable bias introduced by individual students during the peer assessment process. A new normalisation process is introduced to iron out the inherent shortcomings of the existing peer assessment method. The experience gained so far has led us to believe that this peer assessment method with normalisation can be used as a tool to assess individual marks of a group project. © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd.