8.5 Red card / yellow card

Students and staff alike are reluctant to reward group members who do not contribute, although some groups seem perfectly happy to "carry" a hitch-hiker. In either case, it is impossible for staff to know precisely how much work each team member did: only the students involved know this.

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This bundle gives students some control over the behaviour of members of their project group and allows their non-performance to be factored into assessment.

The way it works is that students are allowed to issue others in their project group with yellow, and in extremis, red cards. A yellow card is "shown" to a student who is deficient in effort or attitude or in other ways not making a full contribution to the group and is then lodged with the project supervisor. Being "shown a yellow card" results in a known penalty being applied to the student (for example a fixed number of marks lost), though a yellow card may be cancelled by increased effort, or at a boundary between phases of the project, or after a set time. A student who attracts the maximum number of yellow cards can be "shown a red card", which excludes the student from the rest of the project and sets the mark awarded to zero. There is no recovery from a red card.

These cards are public documents and their issue is a formal process. It must be ratified by a majority of the students in the group, and the final step of the procedure (actually issuing the card) can only be undertaken by the supervisor. A collateral benefit of this process is that the number of yellow cards received by a student across a programme can be used as a monitoring tool.

It works better if staff set the parameters of control (the penalty, the number of yellow cards that can be carried)

It doesn't work if the system leads to the frivolous use of penalties. It doesn't work unless day-to-day management of the resource/role allocation is in the hands of the group themselves.

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So: find a mechanism which devolves some control over the performance of group members to the groups themselves.