Groupwork is a key component of many courses, but some ways of assessment may damage student experience.
Use IPAC to assess the individual contribution, promote student engagement and reduce complaints - it has never been easier for staff.
Making assessment of group work – fairer, simpler and more insightful.
Groupwork is a key component of many courses, but some ways of assessment may damage student experience.
Use IPAC to assess the individual contribution, promote student engagement and reduce complaints - it has never been easier for staff.
Group work in Higher Education has many benefits when incorporated into modules or programmes of study. However, it also raises concerns regarding fairness of individual marks and student engagement. The IPAC methodology for assessment of group work (IPAC standing for Individual Peer Assessment of Contribution to group work) addresses these initial concerns as well as brings other educational benefits and opportunities for student development.
The IPAC method allows tutors to give a fairer/individual mark to the students based on the group outcome, but also on how peers value each individual in the group based on their contribution to the group work, effort, professional behaviour, etc. It engages students in self-reflection and writing professional and critical feedback, gives insightful and valuable information to the students on how their contributions are perceived, and encourages better participation of students through the activity.
This assessment method also provides insightful information for staff, and it is particularly useful when the staff observations of each group are limited, e.g. when group work takes place mostly outside the classroom or online.
The UCL IPAC system, designed and developed at the University College London, allows tutors to implement the IPAC methodology easily and time efficiently within your Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), while providing an excellent level of customization and transparency. It also gives the means to provide quick personalized tutor feedback to each student even in large classes.
It has been designed from an academic user point-of-view, considering a range of needs identified from many practitioners. The UCL IPAC system works with several VLEs, such as Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard and others that allow for LTIs. Contact us for more information on compatibility, arranging demo sessions and licence pricing.
...and other VLEs supporting LTIs.
Not using any of the above? Contact us for more info/options.
"Groupwork is a central element of the UCL BASc programme and being able to assessing each individual student’s contribution as fairly as possible is vital to doing so successfully. Besides, asking students to deeply engaging with assessing their peers also represents a vital learning experience and helps them reflect on their own performance. Consequently, we employ peer assessment of students’ individual contribution for virtually all of our core modules and the IPAC tool is one of the most simplest ways to doing this. The new version of the tool plugs seamlessly into Moodle, which makes it really easy for students to use and very straightforward for us to process the numbers."
"Groupwork is a central element of the UCL BASc programme and being able to assessing each individual student’s contribution as fairly as possible is vital to doing so successfully. Besides, asking students to deeply engaging with assessing their peers also represents a vital learning experience and helps them reflect on their own performance. Consequently, we employ peer assessment of students’ individual contribution for virtually all of our core modules and the IPAC tool is one of the most simplest ways to doing this. The new version of the tool plugs seamlessly into Moodle, which makes it really easy for students to use and very straightforward for us to process the numbers."
"I decided to trial IPAC two years ago [2019], to address the problem of perceived unfairness in the marking of group work, since some team members may take advantage of the work of others. I was concerned that introducing the IPAC software would add considerably to my already problematic workload, but actually it was much easier to implement than I expected […]. The use of this software needs to be introduced and explained very clearly to the students in a live workshop, but this seems to be the only significant additional task; setting up is a little time consuming the first time only, when deciding marking criteria and other parameters. Comparing the IPAC software with other, similar, commercially available software, I was impressed by its flexibility: virtually all parameters can be modified easily, and also the final individual score for each student can be calculated in different normalised or percentage ways. The response of the students to the introduction of the software was overwhelmingly positive. I would never consider stop using the IPAC system."
"I have been running group projects since 2013 and struggled to find a way to motivate individuals to contribute whilst still wanting students to learn for themselves the value and challenges of working in teams including the value of giving and receiving feedback. IPAC worked really well as a through-term mechanism where students got feedback from peers that they could respond to and a score that I could use to adjust marks for individual contribution where needed. Students found it easy to use and motivation increased."
Do you want a demo or test the system first? Got another question?
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