Assessing group work
The intended learning outcomes should be the starting point when developing an assessment criteria for group work.
Criteria should be transparent, logical, constructively aligned, and reward appropriate group behaviour.
You may need to develop different criteria for the product and process of group work if you are assessing both, and consider criteria for peer assessment if this is a feature of your strategy.
Group work assessment criteria must make clear to students how marks are balanced between both the individual student's effort and the group's effort, process of group work and the product.
In addition, there are a number of other important assessor and criteria questions to answer:
Who is going to decide the criteria?
Tutor or students or both?
Co-designing criteria with students can have a positive impact upon group working as well as promoting assessment literacy.
You also need to consider who is assessing.
Will it be you, members of the module team, external assessors, industry professionals, or the students?
If students are assessing group work, will you use self-assessment and/or peer-assessment?
Will they be assessing academic quality of outputs or contributions to the group processes?
Or a combination of the two?
If the quality of outputs is assessed, will students assess members of their own group or the work produced by other groups?
Whichever method you adopt, it will be vital that all assessors have a shared understanding of assessment criteria and standards.
Which means you will need to think how this can be achieved, and integrate this into your strategy.