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Introduction

SPLAT is an online tool used by students to assess the contributions of individual members of their team, as well as themselves. Using course coordinator-defined criteria, an individual weighting factor, more commonly known as a Peer Assessment Factor or PAF, can be calculated for each student.

This PAF score can be used to underpin a mentoring session with the team, or, if applied to team marks, can be used to generate an individual mark commensurate with contribution.

Procedure

Create a SPLAT Assignment

Create a Canvas assignment (Links to an external site.). When creating or editing the assignment (Links to an external site.), select External Tool as the submission type, and from the Find menu, select ‘SPLAT’.

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Depending on whether the SPLAT column in the Gradebook is going to be used in the total/final grade, you may want to check the option:

Enter the remaining Assignment settings as necessary, before clicking Save.

Note: A column in the Gradebook with no automatic grade integration will be created on Save of the assignment. Grade integration is manual in SPLAT in the Administration tab, see #10.

Tips:

1. 1. We recommend you leave the assignment description box blank; this information can be populated at the assignment setup.
  2. Select and your saved SPLAT assignment can be viewed full screen for you and the students.

Assignment setup

Instructions

You can enter your assignment description in the Instructions box that appears here (max 5000 characters) and click continue when complete.

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Note: Once your SPLAT assignment has been published you cannot edit the instruction unless you reset the groups. If required, further instructions can be added to the assignment text by selecting the Edit assignment settings button.

Assignment Questions

Questions are grouped by categories which are the relevant Graduate Attributes we believe SPLAT can help students develop.

You can either select default questions by ticking the box next to each question or add a custom question by typing your text in the custom text box and dragging it to the most appropriate category

Tips:

1. 1. Default questions can be re-ordered within the set category.
  2. Custom questions can re-ordered and moved to any category.

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Group Management

Using the drop-down menu, select the group set to be used for the SPLAT assignment. Groups and group memberships, from the selected group set, will be displayed for preview. Select Finish, then click Confirm to import the selected group set. UG SS7.png

Note:

The group set with groups and group memberships must be ready before importing into a SPLAT assignment.
The student-managed group option is not available for SPLAT assignments, to prevent students from being added to multiple groups for the same SPLAT assignment.
Once confirmed, your group set can be changed in the assignment administration tab until a student score has been submitted.
Group names should not exceed 31 characters due to worksheet character limitation in the Assignment Results (Excel) spreadsheet.
Special characters are not supported in SPLAT group names.

Assignment Checks

Now you have imported your groups, you can now view your selected questions and check your groups are correct in the Moderation tab.

Ensure you have published the assignment (Links to an external site). As soon as it is published and the ‘Available from’ date has passed (if applicable), students can begin submitting their scores.

Students must now distribute 100 points per assessment criteria amongst their group members and themselves.

There is a counter displaying the remaining points to award for each criterion.
Students have only one opportunity to submit; they cannot go back and amend their distributed points after submission (unless instructors clear their attempt).

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Note:

The MyUni/Canvas "Student view" button will not work with SPLAT as it is not core Canvas functionality.
The SV Account will not work as this account is not normally assigned to a group.

Moderation

Limit Average

Setup a limit as to how far from the average (1.0) the individual SAPA should be allowed to deviate. A limit is usually between 10% and 15% (default value in SPLAT). Any score that falls outside the range (i.e. for a limit of 15%, all SAPA greater than 1.15 or less than 0.85 represents a score that will skew the PAF and is highlighted.

Changing the limit will result in the highlighting of scores. The lower the limit is set so, the more scores will get highlighted.

Student PAF scores outside of the greater range of 1.1 and the lower range of 0.6 will be highlighted.

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Student Comments

Only instructors will be able to see the comments students enter.

Clicking on the comments will display the full text, which can be copied and pasted into other areas, e.g. email or Word document.

Academic Intervention

Academics can remove students from a group by striking through a group member name in the Total Marks Assigned By Peers section of the table in the Moderation tab (that students' scores will display as N/A). Excluding students who have not contributed to the group, and recalculating the score on the remaining students.

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Scores that will potentially skew the PAF results can be excluded from the calculation by a single-click on the cell. Once excluded, the score will be crossed out and the relevant PAF/SAPA will be automatically re-calculated. Clicking on the score again can undo the exclusion.

Reporting

The Assignment Results spreadsheet is a summary of the moderated student submissions and the PAF/SAPA results, and also shows raw data from each assignment group in separate tabs.

To produce a report, click to download a summary of the moderated student submissions and the PAF/SAPA results

Tip: Hovering your mouse over the 'Export Assignment Results’ button, will show how many students from the group set have submitted their scores.

Note:

The Assignment Results spreadsheet now opens in Excel format, not CSV allowing the spreadsheet to be easily filtered and edited.
If Group names exceed 31 characters, the worksheet names will be truncated in the Assignment Results (Excel) spreadsheet due to the character limitation of Excel. The full Group name will appear as a heading in the worksheet.

Administration

Notify Students

In case a reminder is needed for non-completed students, the Notify Student(s) feature provides a list of such students and enables academics to send a MyUni notification with custom subject and text via the standard MyUni notification channel.

Note: It is recommended to use this feature close to OR after the Due Date so that the notification is only sent to a limit group when appropriate.

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Clear Attempts

The Clear Attempt feature allows academics to delete submitted responses to a SPLAT assignment for any specified student by using their A number or the first three letters of their first or last name.

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Grade Integration

The Grade Integration feature updates the SPLAT assignment column in the Gradebook by multiplying the results of the original group/project work, referred to as the base assignment in SPLAT, by the PAF score, for each individual student who has done submission, i.e. the results of the base assignment multiply PAF score.

For students who don't have a PAF score, their results in the SPLAT assignment will be the same as in the base assignment.

This integration can happen multiple times during the moderation process as required. The SPLAT assignment column will be updated after the integration by using the latest version of PAF score. However, currently once an integration has happened, there is no way to revert back to any previous version.

Tips:

1. 1. The base assignment needs to be set up using a grade type of one of the following: Percentage, Points, or Letter Grade.
  2. The base assignment must be a group assignment to appear in the drop-down list
  3. SPLAT assignments must be published in order to use grade integration.

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Reset Groups

The reset function allows groups to be reset before student scores have been submitted.

By clicking the Reset button your group/s will be reset and you will be taken back to the instruction point of the SPLAT assignment creation.

All your data will remain so unless you want to edit the assignment, click Continue until you reach Group management where you can select your group/s.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the SPLAT/PAF score – how is it calculated?

The PAF is calculated by the sum of all scores attributed to a student divided by the number of criteria multiplied by 100:

$P A F_{S t u d e n t} = \frac{\sum S c o r e s_{G i v e n t o s t u d e n t}}{N_{c r i t e r i a} \times 100}$

The above formula assumes all students have completed the assessment. If a student has not completed the assessment then the equation becomes:

$P A F_{S t u d e n t} = \frac{\sum S c o r e s_{G i v e n t o s t u d e n t}}{N_{c r i t e r i a} \times 100} \times \frac{N_{S t u d e n t s i n t e a m}}{N_{S t u d e n t s c o m p l e t i n g p e e r a s s e s s m e n t}}$

Note: The SPLAT tool corrects for this automatically.

How should I interpret the SPLAT/PAF score?

A student who pulls their own weight in a team and who does similar amounts of work to everyone else will achieve a PAF of 1.0.

Students who lead the team and who are recognised to put in extra work will achieve a PAF of above 1.0.

It should be noted that in order for students to reward someone that they believe is doing extra work, they have to take points from another student who may not be ‘free riding’ but who is perceived to not be doing quite as much as the rest of the team.

Therefore it is quite usual for students to receive PAFs slightly below 1.0 but not to be in danger of failing as their teammates have ‘robbed Peter to pay Paul’.

The following table shows the various levels of PAFs and possible interpretation based on formal study conducted by other Australian universities with their engineering students:

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What is the SAPA score – how is it calculated?

A minority of students will use the peer assessment to give themselves a higher PAF than is warranted or potentially, to penalise other team members. This may be seen by comparing their score for a particular student against the average of the other team members’ scores for that particular student.

The SAPA (self-assessment over peer assessment) is the score that the student has given themselves over the average of the scores that all the other students have given them:

$S A P A = \frac{S c o r e_{S e l f}}{\sum S c o r e_{O t h e r s} / (N_{T e a m} - 1)}$

If a number of criteria are being used then the ‘Score’ and $S c o r e_{O t h e r s}$ needs to be a total across all criteria. A SAPA of over 1.0 indicates that the student believes they do more in the team than their teammates think; a SAPA less than 1.0 indicates that the student undervalues their contribution. The scores for individual students are also calculated as per the SAPA:

$R a t i o_{I n d i v i d u a l o v e r a v e r a g e} = \frac{S c o r e_{A s s i g n e d i n d i v i d u a l b y s t u d e n t A}}{\sum S c o r e_{A l l o t h e r t e a m m e m b e r s} / (N_{T e a m} - 1)}$

Note: the SPLAT tool calculates these ratios.