Nowadays many high schools and universities require students to work on projects in groups and all members of the group receive the same grade mark on the project Do you agree or disagree that giving every member of a group the same grade is a good way to

There are different ways such as essays, exams, and group projects for teachers to evaluate students’ study performance. And it is also prevalent in high school and university courses that students are assigned with group projects that need them to finish cooperatively. Although some might argue that it is not a good way for teachers to give every member of a group the same grade, I would claim that this method is still useful to assess students.

Of course, some would probably argue that if all the members of a group receive the same grade, some students might simply become free-rider and simply do not contribute to the completion of a project; some might rely on their teammates’ work to finish it. Further, some opponents point out that some students therefore might lose motivation to complete their project because they have to undertake the rest of work supposedly carried out by their members. Well, although this sounds reasonable and true to some extent, I think teachers can formulate some good method to prevent students from contributing nothing to group project. For example, instructors can require students to divide their project into certain sections that each individual student need to work on, keep track of the progress and the amount of work every student achieve by certain date, and inform students of the penalty of not contributing anything to the group project. All these potential measures can solve the problem of freeriding and de-motivation stated by opponents of the method of group project equal grading.

On the other hand, the method of assigning the same grade to each member of a group has several benefits to evaluate students’ study performance. First, compared to individually assessed method such as exam and essays, students who participate in group project would surely undertake something that simply cannot be done by themselves individually, which is why they need to cooperate in teams to finish a large project such as field trip visit or book presentation. During the process of completing a project, students would need to cooperate with their members, communicate frequently, discuss and explain their ideas, schedule certain dates to finish a project incrementally, selecting and comparing related sources of a project topic, all of which definitely exercise students’ interpersonal skill and cooperation ability, which cannot be gained from exams or essays.

From instructor’s point of view, assigning the same grade to group members can save them a lot of work if they have to individually give students different grades, which can be tremendous amount of work. Furthermore, since group project is inherently finished by group members, if they receive different grades, students might have confusion and disagreement on how and why instructors give individual members a different grade, causing dissent and grading problems. For example, when I was a college student in my philosophy of technology class, we were required to present book reviews of a philosophy text in the end of the semester. We were informed that we would receive different grade eventually, which caused a lot of students to ask how did my professor evaluate and determine who got what grade. Although we needed to take on different kinds of work such as making slides, reading book chapters and taking reading notes, we were together and collectively contributing to the final project presentation. So naturally we felt it is unfair and bizarre that instructors would gave different grades to us.

In conclusion, despite some seeming drawbacks of the method of giving group members the same grade, I would argue that this method indeed brings numerous benefits to students and is efficient for instructors too