Teaching development grants final and financial report: A new process to fairly score individual contributions to a team project

Thanks to their well-documented benefits, team projects are increasingly popular as a valuable tool in higher education. Fully realizing such benefits, however, is predicated on the presumption of no free riding. Hence, a suitably designed assessment method for team projects should ex ante discourage free riding before project commencement and ex post punish free riders when such behavior is found to exist upon project completion. The Online Assessment System for Individual Scores (OASIS) has been implemented by teachers across seven universities in the U.S., Hong Kong, mainland China and India. It is simpler to use than the popular online assessment system Comprehensive Assessment for Team-Member Effectiveness (CATME) that employs a statistical analysis of student survey data. Compared to another popular system, Web Peer Assessment (WebPA), it is less vulnerable to a team member’s strategic behavior that can bias individual scores. Highlighting the process’ practicality and usefulness are the continued interest in using OASIS of all participating teachers for their future courses, and student surveys indicating that OASIS can improve student perception on the educational value of team projects. Hence, OASIS deserves serious consideration by teachers worldwide who are already or consider using team projects in their teaching courses.