Towards a Paradigm Change in Group and Peer Assessment in Software Engineering Education

Abstract

Conventional approaches to group and peer assessment are invariably based on highly questionable assumptions about educational measurement and how to weight and aggregate multiple scores into an overall judgement of outcome and performance. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach based on a sound theory of educational scoring and rating. Our approach is particularly relevant for software engineering education, where group projects with multiple types of outcomes are used to assess individual students. We will also demonstrate our novel approach by means of two software tools and compare them with other tools based on conventional approaches. Throughout, we will focus on explaining the reasons for and benefits of adopting our paradigm changing approach to group-peer marking.