CSCI 265 individual contribution assessments

CSCI 265 team project individual contribution assessment

As mentioned on the main projects page, for each phase's team deliverable the instructor will assign a mark reflecting how well it meets course expectations, but each individual in the team will be given a mark that is scaled based on their contributions to the phase.

Needless to say, equitable evaluation of the contributions each person has made is a tricky and judgement-based undertaking: different team members may be working on entirely different aspects (writing documentation, preparing artwork, designing the project, writing the code, carrying out testing, preparing presentations, managing the team version control processes, organizing and running team meetings, handling task delegation, etc etc etc).

The process below is meant to provide a reasonable scheme for evaluation, but I'm fully aware that students can feel that their contributions haven't been fairly assessed. Please please please come see me if you don't think that you or one of your teammates is being assessed fairly. I'm very open to the discussion and would much rather see potential issues dealt with promptly rather than letting things fester and creating rifts within the team.

The objective is for each person on each team, at the end of each phase, to send the instructor their evaluation of how much each person on the team has contributed to the phase. For each phase you have 29 points to distribute across team (including yourself), e.g. 4 points to person A, 9 points to person B, 8 points to person C, 8 points to person D.

It is not expected that everyone contribute equally on each phase, but over the course of the entire project it is expected that people contribute roughly equally. Depending on their roles and responsibilities in the project and their workloads responsibilities in other course and in 'real life', different team members will have different workloads on each phase. The hope/expectation is that over the course of the term this roughly balances out.

There are a few restrictions:

your allocation of points must total exactly 29 across the team
you must explicitly state a point value for each person on the team (even if that point value is 0)
you cannot allocate fractions of points (i.e. no "7.25 for each of us")
for each person on the team you must provide a written justification for your score: describing what you feel that person contributed (or failed to contribute) for that phase
YOU WILL RECEIVE ZERO FOR THE PHASE UNTIL YOU HAVE COMPLETED YOUR ASSESSMENT OF THE TEAM'S CONTRIBUTIONS

You can see copies of the phaseX.md contribution documents here.

The scores you allocate and your justification is private between you and the instructor, but the whole team will be told what the average scores were when you get your feedback, e.g. based on the assessments from the four team members, the contribution averages were Person A 22, Person B 31, Person C 33, Person D 30.

To help ensure fair reviews: I strongly recommend teams make a point of having every team member update the rest of the team (weekly or biweekly) on what they've been working on, what they're about to work on, and problems encountered, anticipated, or resolved.

I also suggest that for each role a team assigns they also assign an understudy or backup person: someone who helps the primary person in that role and has a much more detailed understanding of what is going on with respect to that role. (This also helps the team cope in those cases where someone drops the course or is ill/injured for a portion of the term.)

Again, if you feel your contribution has been unfairly assessed please please come see the instructor as soon as possible

The mechanics of submitting your contribution assessments

To submit your individual assessments of contributions privately (and to get a little more practice with git at the same time), the following process must be followed:

The instructor will create a 'contributions' git repo, which you will fork/clone using our usual gitsubmit cycle (discussed below).

Within that repo there will be six .md files, phase1.md, phase2.md, etc.

Within 48 hours of the lab presentation time for phase 1, you will edit/complete the phase1.md file in your cloned repo and submit (git add/push) it to the instructor. Similarly within 48 hours of the lab presentation time for phase 2 you will edit/complete/submit your phase 2 assessments, and so on for all six phases.

The git fetch/clone/submit cycle:

To obtain the repository initially (just done once near the start of term):
   ssh  csci  fork  csci265/contributions  csci265/$USER/contributions
   git  clone  csci:csci265/$USER/contributions

Change directory into the repo when you want to edit/submit your assessment
   cd contributions
   vim phase1.md     (ok, so I'm a vim guy, feel free to use your preferred editor :)

   git add phase1.md
   git commit -m "phase 1 contribution assessments complete"

   git push