Peer Evaluations

Peer evaluations are submitted by the out-going team leader when leadership changes. See Teamwork for more details.

Submit peer evaluations named «TeamName»_peer_eval.pdf to the appropriate LEARN dropbox.

A peer evaluation consists of a paragraph on the contributions of each team member. Try to be as objective as you can. Did they attend all team meetings? Were they on time for the meetings? Did they watch the week’s lecture videos and complete their reflective readings (if any) in advance of the meeting? Was their work done on schedule/as promised/with due diligence? Did they take on a leadership and/or organizational role? Were they easy to work with? Did their work require extra checking by the rest of the group? Did they stay late when extra effort was required? Be sure to evaluate yourself as well. Be as honest as you can.

As part of your evaluation, assign each member a numerical grade. You have 5 marks per person on your team to distribute as you see fit, plus an extra mark to assign if someone on your team performed exceptionally well. Thus, if you are part of a team of four, you have 20+1 marks to distribute among the team members. Here are some rough guidelines on how you might want to distribute the marks:

• A mark of 1 or 2 indicates someone who is an unmitigated disaster. You rue the day he/she was born, and hope you never end up with someone like this on your team when you work in industry.
• A mark of 3 indicates someone you really wouldn’t want to work with again. There are serious shortcomings to his/her abilities or attitude. He/she is the sort of person you will probably run into in industry, but will try to avoid as much as you can.
• A mark of 4 means that a group member did reasonable work, but was lacking in some area. His/her work was OK, but not great, or he/she wasn’t serious enough, etc. He/she is the sort of person with whom you could work without too much trouble, although you wish he/she were a bit smarter/more diligent/easier to deal with.
• A mark of 5 indicates a group member who did a really fine job on everything that was asked of him/her. He/she showed up on time to meetings, did his/her work on time and well, and chipped in as needed. He/she is the sort of person you would hope to work with in industry.
• A mark of 6 indicates someone took on a leadership role, did extra work that others did not, perhaps picked up the slack from a member who didn’t perform as well, and went well above and beyond the call of duty. You really hope that you’ll get at least one person like this on your team when you work in industry.
• A mark of 7 indicates someone who leaps tall buildings in a single bound, walks on water, and solves NP-complete problems in linear time. You hope your company has at least one person like this, and that he/she knows you by name so that there is a chance you might one day get to work on a project with him/her.

To re-iterate: the sum of the marks you award must be no more than N*5+1, where N is the number of people on your team. You may award fewer than N*5+1 marks if you wish.

Here is a sample imaginary evaluation¹:

• Candorsnaffity Hixelbrod was an annoying teammate. He was late for both meetings, and had not looked at the deliverable or done any kind of preparation in advance. At the Wednesday meeting, Candorsnaffity offered to do the whole project himself, which the rest of us found very insulting – maybe he’s the best programmer in the class, but the rest of us are still good enough to be successful Waterloo students. Finally he agreed that he’d do the sushi-ionization module by Sunday afternoon, but he didn’t finish it until almost midnight, and the rest of us couldn’t combine his work with ours until Monday evening, which meant we had to stay up late to get it done by Tuesday. I’d give him 2 points, except that on Monday evening (after he finally got there), he found all the bugs that the rest of us were missing and got the assignment working with twenty minutes work. He’s probably a great hacker when he’s alone: honestly, he’s the best programmer of the four of us, but we’re all annoyed that he was so little help. So he gets 3 points.
• Prosnitau Sgrachita de la Mnirhoihoi was good, helpful and co-operative. She arranged the first meeting and had worked out a module structure and a division of labour before we met, which we adopted after a bit of bickering. She had her parts of the program done on time, and they only had one small bug in them. And she stayed late to make sure that the integration went smoothly, when we all know she hadn’t slept the night before. She gets 6 points.
• V’snl’chm’tkn!k of the Fortress of Doom (that’s me) was an effective worker in this assignment. I had sketched algorithms in advance for two parts, which Wub and I implemented. My code was ready on time, and worked except for one boundary case. Also, I helped Wub with his part of the assignment. I award myself 5 points.
• Wub Catcherofahundredsquids was willing and enthusiastic but not very smart. He volunteered for the hardest module, but I had to help him get it working. But he did tell us all on Friday that he couldn’t get his part working alone, so at least it wasn’t an emergency. He also brought cookies to the Monday meeting, and stayed up extra-late testing the program. I give him 4 points on skill, and 1 more for being helpful: 5 points total.