A Rigorous Capstone Peer Evaluation Process

Peer evaluations are an important tool to help students learn in a team-based project.In our engineering capstone design program, we utilize a multi-step peer evaluation process that provides substantial feedback to help prepare students to become better engineers.Anonymous peer evaluations are conducted twice per semester during the two-semester capstone design course for a total of four evaluations.In these evaluations, each student rates each of their teammates (and themselves) in six categories that reflect different aspects of teamwork.In addition, students are required to provide a pair of written comments for each of their teammates and themselves.After review by the instructors, the peer evaluations with the comments are released back to the students for their review.This entire process is supported by classroom instruction to help students understand how to give and receive peer feedback Although these peer evaluations are used in grading, we believe that peer feedback and self-reflection are the most beneficial aspects of the process for students.A critically important step in this process is scheduling individual meetings with lower-rated students to discuss their performance.Our goal in these meetings is not to establish blame, but to understand each student's situation and offer advice and strategies they can use to improve their performance and better engage with their project and their teammates.This paper describes the overall peer evaluation process we use.We detail the follow-up meeting process and present data to show that it is effective in helping students improve by examining their ratings in subsequent peer evaluations after meeting with us.