Do you have another question that we have not answered in the documentation or in the FAQs? Do you want advice on how to implement the IPAC methodology on your class/activity?

Email: IPACsupport@ucl.ac.uk

Which moderation options do we have when a student receives a very low IPAC score?

There are two options that you can activate in the IPAC software > Settings > Moderation section. These are:

• Exclude students with a very low score.
  • This ignores any scores given BY this particular student to their peers. The idea behind this is that a student that has not engaged with the group does not know how the others worked or contributed to the team.
  • This student still receives a mark, which is obtained from the scores that they received from the other students.
  • Mathematically, the marks that s/he looses will be distributed among the rest of the group, so you can end up with scores such as 0.2 (the non-engaged student), 1.2, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2 in a group of 5 where 1 did not contribute much.
• Exclude students with a very low score COMPLETELY
  • Same as for the above, any scores given by this particular student to their peers are ignored.
  • The student is given a zero, so the tutor needs to assign them a mark in a different way.
  • Mathematically, it is as if the student was taken out of the group. Now we have 4 students in the group, and if they all contributed the same, they all get IPAC marks of 1 each.

Do you have any suggestions/guidelines on how to do the moderations?

Tutor moderation is quite personal, and highly dependent on class size, the time available to the tutor and how much in depth he/she wishes to go. Below are some pointers/suggestions listed for feedback personalisation.

1. Check the initial IPAC score for each student and identify the outliers – values that tutor feels are significantly low or significantly high. As a suggestion, check the IPAC normalized values below 0.9 and over 1.1. Check the comments are aligned with the mark. Compare with tutor observations if available or if necessary for a given student. Revisit these scores after automatic moderations (below) and decide if further tutor moderation is needed.
2. Automatic moderation done by the IPAC software to ignore self-promoting scores (activated and customized by tutor): Check the self-promotion score, which is provided by the IPAC software. This quantifies how a student has valued his/her contribution in regards to the contribution of the group (ratio of averages). If the self-promotion score is too high (threshold customized by the tutor, but 1.25 can be set as a suggestion), then the software ignores the scores given by that student from the calculations.
3. Automatic moderation done by the IPAC software to ignore scores from non-contributed members of the team (activated and customized by the tutor). The tutor can give a threshold for the minimum IPAC score a student needs to have before being allowed to take his/her peer marks into account (an IPAC score of 0.5 is suggested). The reasoning is that those students that do not contribute to the group cannot accurately rate their peers
4. Recalculate the IPAC scores.
5. (Optional) Apply a cap (low and high) if desired. E.g. if you cap IPAC values to 0.7 – 1.2, then you are only allowing for a -30% and +20% deviation from the group mark, even though there might be students with a lower performance than that.
6. Check students with very low IPAC scores – are there extenuating circumstances? Do we need an alternative method of assessment for those students, i.e. not via the group work?
7. Moderation of the students' comments. The software flags profanities so the tutor can decide how to moderate the peer feedback. (However this should be very rare)
8. Check the comments allocated to students with low IPAC scores. If any comments are overly critical, the tutor can moderate the feedback as s/he deems appropriate.

Should I include self-assessment on the IPAC calculation?

It is good practice to ask students to score and give a comment to themselves. This encourages students to do self-reflection, and it gives staff a “better picture” on how that group worked. Because of that, the IPAC system always asks students to assess themselves as well as their peers.

When calculating the IPAC scores, the self-scores can be easily filtered out by selecting the appropriate setting in the IPAC software. This does not make any difference in terms of student experience or ability of the IPAC to provide fair marks.

By default, the IPAC software includes the self-assessment scores in the calculation. It is good practice to check and filter out the self-scores of those students who try to inflate their own marks by giving significantly more to themselves than to their peers. This can be easily identified by checking the “self-promotion score”. See more on Menu > Data analysis with IPAC software > Settings .

Can I personalize the questionnaire to each group?

The questionnaire presented to each group is the same by default. However, customisation for each group is still possible by doing the following.

At the start of the project, each student group is asked to create a team contract where they define conduct expectations and other relevant aspects to working in the group. These can also include defining main criteria for successful group work. The contracts should be submitted somewhere, e.g. in the VLE forum, so there is a copy with a time-stamp on them.

Afterwards, when the tutor sets the IPAC questionnaire, questions can be added about students' compliance with the team contract (and main criteria). Note that the tutor does not need to know the details of the contract, but by asking questions such as “How well did the student comply with the team contract defined at the start of the project?”, they are effectively providing feedbacks personalised to each student group.