2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

By graduation, students majoring in Civil Engineering at ABET accredited institutions must demonstrate proficiency in seven student outcomes relevant to the discipline. One outcome – an ability to work effectively on a team - is particularly important in civil engineering since collaborative projects and assignments are typical course requirements. While considerable research related to the use of peer assessments within teams exists, there are gaps related to evaluating student performance using such assessments. Hence, this paper discusses our approach to evaluating individual performance on group assignments in a quantitative manner given a set of peer assessments.

Students at the United States Military Academy take a course in construction management from the institution’s civil engineering program, yet students from both engineering and non-engineering disciplines enroll in the course. The diversity of academic disciplines is a result of institutional requirements for all non-engineering students to take at least three engineering courses, and many engineering disciplines outside of the civil engineering program allow their students to take the course as an elective (the course is required for those students majoring in civil engineering). Additionally, the students take the course during their junior or senior year and have already participated in group projects across their courses of study by the time they begin this course.

During the third and final block of instruction, students are divided into groups of four or five and are required to develop a construction project for life support facilities in an austere environment. At the conclusion of the project, students must qualitatively assess the performance of each member of the team on a scale ranging from excellent to poor. Given these assessments, the instructor develops a scaling factor for each individual student grade based on a ratio of the individual student’s peer assessments to the group’s peer assessments. At the conclusion of each semester, students were provided with an anonymous survey to collect information on their perceptions of this grading approach. This work not only describes the approach for determining the individual student grades on the project but also presents the results from the student survey.
Data was collected over the course of two non-sequential semesters with a study population of 168 students. This study will be of interest to faculty and administrators that have an interest in approaches to assigning fair grades to individual students for performance on group work.