How to achieve a fair assessment in a group project

The Engineering School where we teach offers one course whose main goal is the design and development of a robotic project. The project is developed by a group of students and provides the main weight to the final mark. Since the course can be chosen by final-year students coming from different engineering degrees, organising and assessing the course can be difficult due to the diversity of the students' skills and knowledge. This paper addresses the challenge of assigning a fair mark to all the students of the group. To this end, the robotic project was devised with the view to dividing the project into different work packages with a value related to the final mark, according to complexity. Each group member was assigned one or two tasks, depending on their complexity. These tasks have several levels of achievement and they are related to two rubrics: one for the project and one for the technical report of the project. The final mark awarded to students depends on the average level of achievement reached by their assigned tasks plus the global marks with a 30% weight to the technical report module and a 70% weight to the project module. The result of the paper proves that the method does not avoid a low global mark due to the presence of "free-riders" but it does allow a fairer assessment to the individual students by denying the free-riders influence.