Individualising students' scores using blind and holistic peer assessment

Group work has the potential to be both educationally effective and resource efficient. It provides opportunities to set more integrative assessment tasks whilst also providing opportunities for the students to learn more than they would by simply responding to the coursework briefing sheet. Issues arise, however, with the necessity to individualise the group score. Teaching teams, having constructed authentic assessments for learning, now have to turn their attention to the assessment of learning on a student-by-student basis. This article presents some of the possible approaches to undertaking this individualisation exercise and includes information on ‘how’ (open versus blind) as well as ‘what’ (category-based versus holistic) data can be used to create an individualisation framework. The application of a ‘blind and holistic’ process is reported, as are examples of the students’ responses. Worryingly, in many instances the groups’ cohesion appeared to diverge towards the end of the project and yet the students still believed that many of them were working at a degree classification of 2.i or above.