ABSTRACT
Social, political and economic turbulence in recent years, combined with the globalisation of education, increases the demand on educators to produce ‘work ready’ graduates, capable of responding to the expectations of a dynamic business landscape. The recasting of the firm as a fluid and uncertain working environment requires employees to acquire enhanced skills in group dynamics, communication, networking and project management. The increasing demand from employers and students alike for business schools to provide the workplace with graduates with such transferable skills is typically addressed via the use of assessed group work.
Prior research in the context of business students has documented group work as being one of the forms of assessment that they least favour (Healy, McCutcheon and Doran, 2014). The perspective of assessment as a reward for effort is the expected student view, in which students taking a strategic approach to learning respond to the cues in assessment to secure good grades (Yorke, 2003). However assessment is viewed in this way from only one of the student perspectives identified by Healy, McCutcheon and Doran (2014). Many students are not primarily concerned with grades but rather more concerned with the nature of the activity, and how difficult, or interesting, it is. Thus the design, delivery and assessment of group work needs to place greater focus on these elements without displacing fairness in grading as a hygiene factor.
Group work and collaborative effort is inherently difficult to assess. Teaching rhetoric as to the benefits of group work can be rendered meaningless if not reinforced via ‘fair’ assessment practices reflecting this rhetoric. In addition, early experiences of group work have been found to influence attitudes to and benefits derived from group work in subsequent modules (Hillyard, Gillespie and Littig, 2010); although not everyone concurs (Chapman and Van Auken, 2001). Forming students into groups therefore does not necessarily promote cooperative learning and the development of transferable skills. Effective group work can be compromised by assessment issues, free rider issues, social issues and ‘sucker’ effects (Davies, 2007; Gammie and Matson, 2007), with some arguing that group work is an inefficient use of scarce student time, leading to lower variance and higher mean grades, reducing the value of grades as a signal to employers (Holt, Michael and Godfrey, 1997).
Institutional policies presenting protocols relating to assessed group work are becoming increasingly commonplace. However, such policies are typically top-down in approach, offering checklists to follow, taking a managerial rather than pedagogic approach to group work. Using focus groups, this study considers perceptions of ‘fairness’ in the context of assessed group work from the perspectives of three distinct stakeholder groups (students, lecturers and employers). Focus groups offered the advantage of allowing the views of a number of participants to emerge and for others to react and respond to those views lending breadth and depth to the research evidence (Bryman and Bell, 2003). The findings of this study provide a complementary perspective on such policies, thereby reinforcing potential epistemic virtues influencing institutional check-lists of recommendations but counteracting the excessive ‘proceduralism’ that might accompany them. The constituent elements of ‘fairness’ (or lack of fairness) in the context of assessed group work are considered. The extent to which the views of varying stakeholders regarding the fair assessment of group work reflect a consistency or divergence of approach, and the implications of this for assessment practices, is also documented. Ultimately, the findings contribute to the development of a set of stakeholder informed protocols on the ‘fair’ assessment of group work.
