Peer Evaluations

In order to receive a grade for this course, you must turn in a final report. This report will be like the two-week reports in that you will be looking back on your work on the game and evaluating what went right and what went wrong. However, this final report is different in two important ways. First of all, you are to look back at the entire semester, and not just the last two weeks. Furthermore, in contrast to previous reports, every group member must submit an different individual report.

The reason for requiring individual reports is that, in the end, we will be assigning individual grades. Therefore, we want to fairly assess the contribution of each team member to the group. In order to do this, we need private peer evaluations. In a peer evaluation, you will write a separate evaluation for each member of the group. That way, every person will have a peer review written about them by every member in the group. For each of you, we will gather all of the peer evaluations your peers have written about you, and then use our best judgement (throw out students with clear personally conflicts, average scores, etc.) to use these values to determine your final grade on the game project (which is 60% your total grade).

In addition to the peer evaluations, we want you to submit a course evaluation. You will notice in CMS that there is a survey titled “Course Evaluation”. The purpose of this survey is to get some feedback about the course and determine what can be done better next time. This course is being modified every year based upon the type of feedback in these surveys.

Peer Evaluations

You should write an evaluation for each member of your group including yourself. This will help us understand whether you think that what your teammates wrote about you is fair or not. How you format the evaluation is up to you. However, they should all have the following format.

First of all, you should provide a short answer to each of the following questions about the person you are evaluating:

• From what you have seen, what are this member’s greatest strengths?
• From what you have seen, what are this member’s greatest weaknesses?
• Would you ever work with this person again? Why or why not?

Next, you should assign that person a numerical score (3 to 0) in each of the following areas. Please pay attention to our interpretation of the numerical score for each category. These are not absolute grades; they are relative grades that we use to adjust an individual’s grade from the game grade.

Participation

3 points: This member consistently and punctually showed up to meetings (in allowance of his or her schedule), attended milestone presentations and work days, and contributed to discussions within the group.

2 points: This member was always (or mostly) present, but perhaps had less of a voice in the development of the game.

1 point: This member was often absent, but still got his or her work done. The particpation was limited to working on assigned tasks.

0 points: This member was absent or missing for long stretches of time. The team effectively had one less person.

Focus

3 points: This member stayed focused and task-oriented on what he or she had to do at all times.
The team member was well aware of the milestones and two-week breakdowns, and consistently met deadlines.

2 points: This member always met deadlines, but often had to be reminded by other team members to stay on target.

1 point: This member missed one or more significant deadlines. This includes material that was completed the night before a presentation and was too late to incorporate into the demo.

0 points: This member constantly missed deadlines, creating extra work for everyone else.

Quantity of Work

3 points: This member contributed an amount of work that either met or exceeded the expectations for the team. In other words, this member “carried their own weight”, and many times did more.

2 points: This member did everything that was asked of him or her, but only what was asked. This member rarely did anything extra to improve the quality of a sprint.

1 point: This member consistently did less work than everyone else. The work was usable, but there was significantly less of it.

0 points: This member did almost no work and might as well have not been part of the team.

Quality of Work

3 points: The work produced by this member was of a quality that either met or exceeded the expectations for the team. The member was very knowledgable in the development role allocated, and never had to be reassigned because of poor quality work.

2 points: The team member either had to be reassigned to find a task that he or she was suitable at, or the code/asset quality required some additional work to integrate it into the main code base.

1 point: The team member produced code/assets that were consistently marginal in quality. A few times the team member might have even produced negative work.

0 points: This team member did significant negative work and held the team back.

Attitude

3 points: This team member respected other ideas and opinions within the group. It was an absolute pleasure to work with this person.

2 points: There were some minor disputes with this team member, but it was still possible to work with him or her. Most of the disagreements where handled professionally.

1 point: This student was occasionally unprofessional in dealing with other team members. There were a few disagreements that got emotionally heated.

0 points: This team member created a truly toxic atmosphere.

Productivity

3 points: This team member motivated the team and contributed to the productive atmosphere. This is not about quantity of work (which you already graded). It is whether this person consistently took initiative to work on the project and get things done, even without being asked.

2 points: The team member had to be assigned tasks, but always did what was asked of them. This person was a useful “cog in the wheel” for your team.

1 point: The team member produced useful work, but required constant micomanagement that actually hurt the morale of the team.

0 points: This student did significant negative work and held the team back.

Mastery Topic (Special)

This category only applies when evaluating masters students. Note that we are talking about the person you are evaluating, not yourself. So an undergraduate student is still expected to say something additional about each of the masters students on their team.

Each masters student chose a mastery topic. This topic was included in one of your two week reports which is visible to everyone on the team. We want you to reflect on the quality of work that the student did on this topic, and how much it contributed to the success of your game.

3 points: This team member did a significant amount of work on their mastery topic, above the normal work that others put into the game, and the quality of their work substantially improved the overall quality of the game.

2 points: This team member did good work on the mastery topic, but it was at the level of the work that everyone else did on the game. While it was valuable, it was not critical to the success of the game.

1 point: The team member worked on the mastery topic, but it had no real visible impact on the quality of the game.

0 points: This member either abandoned or did not start work on their mastery topic.

Overall Grade

Based on all of the items that you have evaluated above, you should assign an overall grade to this team member. This is not actually the grade that I will assign. Remember that individual grades use the group grade as a baseline, so what I really care about is the relative performance of each person in the group. Therefore, your should consider all of my guidelines above in assignment the final grade.

In general, I think of grades as follows:

• A: This person was absolutely crucial to the success of the project.
• B: This person was a solid worker and accomplished every task given.
• C: This person was a weak member of the team, but still provided useful work.
• D: This person held the team back by producing negative work.
• F: This person made no contributions at all (almost never given).

You should also feel free to include whatever additional comments that you would like to make regarding this evaluation.

Submission

Due: Mon, May 22 at 11:59 PM

You should submit the file to peereval to CMS. This file includes your evaluation of all of the members of your group including yourself. Use the guidelines above to produce your evaluations. As usual, please submit this file as a PDF.

In addition, you should fill out the “Course Evaluation” survey in CMS.