Assigning Individualized Grades on a Team Capstone Project

In undergraduate engineering programs, ABET criteria require a capstone or integrating experience to allow students to develop competencies in technical and non-technical problem solving. These capstone experiences typically take the form of a year-long or semester-long project that requires a group of senior students to work as a team to identify, define, design, prototype, and test their final product to solve an engineering problem. Ideally the students on these teams contribute fairly and equitably to the project so that each individual can develop their skills, but it is not unusual to see students on the team who do not contribute their fair share. Often, graded assessments in these capstone courses are team submissions and assigning separate grades to individual students is a difficult task. To overcome this grading challenge, the Mechanical Engineering senior capstone course instructors at [INSTITUTION] have adapted an effective mechanism for awarding a fair grade to each student on the senior design project team based on actual performance and contribution to the project success. This grading scheme is a combination of group assignments, individual assignments, teamwork, and leadership evaluation. The group assignments include project reports and presentations, while the individual assignments include ethics, resume preparation, reflective papers, and FE exam preparation. The course instructors, faculty advisors and observers, and peer evaluations all contribute to the student's overall grade. In this paper, we will demonstrate the effectiveness of these grading components in assigning a fair grade to each team member on the senior design project using data from the last three years.