Ivan Dimchev Undergraduate Dissertation 2014/15

A Peer-Assessment Application to support 'The Intern Competition'

Supervised by M.Gheorghe

Abstract

In recent years, Peer Assessment has been implemented across a wide range of disciplines in many educational establishments around the world. The reasons for this are an increasing dissatisfaction from students when it comes to the assessment of group work, more specifically, the individual grades assigned to each team member. The traditional approach has been to assign the same grade to every student in the team, however this approach encourages some members to contribute less, assuming that the others will contribute enough to earn them a good mark. Since the recognition of this problem, many universities have implemented some form of Peer Assessment, which enables group members to rate each other, thereby allowing supervisors to assign individual marks according to the perceived contribution of each member.

The Intern Competition, an Enactus Sheffield project, is a competition that divides contestants into teams for each of its numerous business tasks. The competition’s Management Team are required to take weekly decisions about which contestants should be eliminated, which is a difficult decision, as the organisers have little contact with contestants during the various stages of the competition.

The aim of this project is to develop an online web application to collect feedback from contestants, in order to support the competition’s management team in their decision-making. This paper will firstly explore the area of Peer Assessment and review some real-world applications, after which functional and non-functional requirements for the application will be specified. Secondly, the design, implementation and testing of the required system will be described.