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 five times during the CS486c semester. The Peer Evals are:

• Peer Eval #1: through Design Doc: Includes Team Formation, Comm. Memo, and Design Doc (draft and final)
• Peer Eval #2: Through Design Review 2, includes UGRADS registration
• Peer Eval #3: Through Design Review 3, includes Software Testing Plan
• Peer Eval #4: Everything to do with Capstone: Dry-run, presentation, poster, website
• Peer Eval #5: All finishing up work, includes final report, acceptance test, and product delivery

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 five peer evals.
• Pre-built for 4-person teams
• Pre-built for 5-person teams
3. Save the downloaded template in a safe place under and 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.
• You only need to put in the member names once (where they are red); the rest will autofill based on that!
• If you have fewer team members than what is shown in the template, just leave the extra columns alone, simply putting in "N/A" for that member name. Specifically, do not change the 100's pre-filled as scores for those columns!
5. Save this pre-filled version. 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 submitting your peer eval sheet to BBlearn by the deadline listed in the schedule.

You will submit the very SAME peer eval spreadsheet every time...only with one more of the table (peer evals) 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 into a new version using the naming convention:

Excel File Name: <teamname>-<your first name>-<peerevalnum>. So for instance "Bigteam-Cindy-peerval1.xlsx"

Email the peer eval to your Team Mentor. Please use the following format for the Subject line in the email, to make identifying the peer evals easy for your mentor:

Email subject line: CS486-<teamname>-PeerEval-<#> where # is the number of the peer eval (i.e. a value 1-5).

How do Peer Evals affect your grade?

If you think about it, a peer eval really amounts to a reflection of the "amount of expected contribution" you made during a particular segment of the course. Thus, peer evaluations become a multiplication factor for the grades the team received during that course segment. If your averaged peer eval rating was perfect (i.e. 100), then that would mean that you did 100% of what the team expected of you...and your grade would be the team grade times 1.0, i.e., you'd get exactly what the team got. If your peer evals were higher/lower, your grade would be higher than the team grade (if you jumped in and did work that others were supposed to do) or lower (if you didn't do your part). Obviously, it's in your best interest to do your part, keep your teammates happy, and communicate clearly about what you are getting done...or not.

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.

Be sure to double-check the Excel file name and the Email subject line formats given above. Otherwise your peer eval may not be recorded!