A study on peer assessment of teamwork projects in undergraduate petroleum engineering education

This paper presents an analysis of the peer assessment data collected for assessing teamwork projects assigned in four petroleum engineering courses offered at the University of New South Wales. Term projects were given to 22 groups composing from 4 to 7 students. Each team was asked to search for an open-ended discipline-specific problem, formulate the problem, provide solutions to the problem and present the outcome through a technical report and an oral presentation. An assessment value of 30% of the total was allocated to the projects. The teamwork performance, technical report, and oral presentation were assessed to determine the total marks for the groups. A peer assessment survey was then undertaken with the main aim to derive the individual marks. The peer assessment was based on logistics, leadership, group dynamics, intellectual and research/writing/editing. The collected data represents a wide range of groups composed of various student profiles which include international and local students, male and female students. The analysis emphasizes the peer assessment as a viable tool for evaluating the individual contributions to a discipline-specific teamwork project. However, the human bias must be adequately adjusted for fair assessments. The study demonstrates that poorly performing students in the groups can be identified by utilising peer assessment. However, this also requires the judgement of the lecturer based on the observation of team members through weekly meetings and the minutes taken during the team meetings. The international students seemed to be more generous than the local peers in the assessment. It was determined that a significant number of students (about 40%) gave the highest marks to peers for all assessment criteria. In four groups out of 22 groups, all team members gave the highest rates to each other for all criteria, which made the peer assessment entirely useless. Three of these four groups were composed of international students only. All these observations underline the necessity to train the students for the importance of the peer assessment.