Computer Science Capstone Design

Task: Peer Evaluations

Overview

Peer evaluations are an effective way of gaining some insight into internal team dynamics and performance, and are an important part of how each individual's final grade is calculated. They require honesty and integrity, but the system we have devised to use with Capstone generally highlights folks who are far out of line in their ratings of themselves or others. In an ideal team, all of the ratings I collect from members more or less concur, with all members rating both themselves higher/lower by similar amounts. And this generally does work out.

Peer evaluations are "anonymous", meaning that you don't see how your team members rate you and vice versa; only the instructor sees all evals for a team. The instructor will never divulge your peer eval scoring directly, but may sometimes refer to aggregate scores, e.g., "the average rating of your teammates", if a conversation needs to be had with a bad apple.

The Assignment

We will do this Peer Evaluation task four times during the CS476 semester. To keep things simple, I have provided you with a nice little Excel template to keep this all clean and efficient.

The Peer Evals are:

• Peer Eval #1: through MiniIntro: Includes team inventory/standards and mini-intro
• Peer Eval #2: Work from last eval up through Tech Feasibility work and document
• Peer Eval #3: Work from last eval up through Design Review 1 prep and presentation, and Req. Doc draft.
• Peer Eval #4: Work from last eval up through all finishing up work, including Req. Doc final, prep/presentation of Tech Demo and website review

We need to make this as painless as possible for both you and Capstone faculty! Thus, there is a simple plan:

1. First, begin by reading about how peer evals work. Read carefully! If you submit a peer eval that is incorrect or incomplete, your score will suffer accordingly.
2. For the first peer eval, you will download this simple, pre-formatted Excel spreadsheet. You will note that it has room for all four peer evals.
3. Save the downloaded template in a safe place under an informative name. You will be returning to this spreadsheet several times over the semester!
4. Open your peer evals spreadsheet and edit/replace the text in red. filling in your name, team name, and member names.
   • Look!!! You only need to put in the member names once in the row for the first peer eval (where they are red); the rest will autofill based on that!
   • Please enter teammate names left-to-right in the same order they appear on the Capstone teams page showing all of this year's team (linked from CS476 home page)
   • If you have less than team members than allotted in the spreadsheet, just leave the extra columns alone, simply putting in "N/A" for that member name. Specifically, do not delete columns or change the 100's pre-filled as scores for those columns!
5. Save this pre-filled version in a safe place where you can find it easily through the term. Your peer eval sheet is now all set, and you are now ready to complete your first peer eval!

How to submit each peer eval:

As we said, you will fill out the peer eval five times during the semester, each time emailing your peer eval sheet to your team mentor (see Deliverables below) by the deadline listed in the schedule.

You will (re)submit the very same peer eval spreadsheet every time...only with one more of the table (peer eval) filled in. So the first time you submit, only the table for Peer1 will be filled, the second time you submit, you'll have values for Peer1 and Peer2, and so on. The last time you submit, at the end of the term, your entire sheet will be filled out.

This approach has several advantages:

• You are required to fill out peer evals immediately after the relevant deliverable(s) are due. This is way better than doing it all at the end.
• Since the sheet contains all peer evals, you can look back at previous evals as you fill out the next one. This allows you to reflect on the trajectory of performance of each team member.
• Faculty mentors can reflect on the evolution of your relationship with your teammates when they are assigning scores for teamwork, by seeing all of your peer evals in one place.

When you have completed the table + comments for the peer eval that is due, save the sheet, then email it to your team mentor for review and grade entry (see below).

Deliverables

Each time a peer evaluation is due (see schedule), fill out the corresponding rating table + comments on your evolving peer eval sheet, save the sheet, then email the spreadsheet to your team mentor before the deadline, including any comments needed to explain your scoring of teammates.

Please use the following format for the Subject line in the email, to make identifying the peer eval easy for your mentor: CS476-<teamname>-PeerEval-<#> where # is the number of the peer eval (i.e. a value 1-5).