Exploring Peer Evaluation Methods in Group Projects of Software Engineering Education

This Innovative Practice category full paper proposes an innovative approach to enhance peer evaluations in group-based learning. It aims at enhancing the overall peer assessment experience for students in software engineering education. In the software industry, it is all about teamwork for software development projects. There is a need to nurture students to work collaboratively in group-based learning. The collaborative milieu inherent in group projects has long been acknowledged within the sphere of software engineering education. In our university, students are cultivated the effective teamwork within the purview of CSC2101 - Professional Software Development and Team Projects (PSD & TP1), an undergraduate course in the domain of software engineering. The terrain of software group projects still presents its own array of obstacles, such as unequal contributions, internal conflicts, peer evaluation mechanism, etc. This paper first discusses the limitations of the current peer evaluation methods in this course. Next, the proposed methodology is presented that embodies four key elements: transparency, anonymity, structured assessment, and qualitative feedback. The implementation details of the proposed approaches are then described consisting of the following features and mechanisms: online platform, anonymous profiles, public results, and structured evaluation forms. The rationales for the proposed peer evaluation techniques are discussed. The experiment studies are conducted involving 40 students in our university. It includes numerous characteristics of the peer evaluation experience in order to gain a full picture of existing peer evaluation approaches within software engineering education. The survey results show a generally positive mentality toward the proposed features.