There may be times when you wish students to work together on assignments and submit their work as a group. QMplus allows you to define an assignment as being a group assignment. You can control whether the submission is made by one group member or by all and you can choose to give one grade for the whole group, or to assign individual grades to each group member.

This guide describes how to set up and mark a group assignment. It is assumed that you are familiar with setting up assignments and groups on QMplus.

Setting your assignment to be a group assignment

Create an assignment in your QMplus area. If you don’t know how to do this, see our Creating a standard QMplus assignment guide.

In the assignment settings, scroll to the Group assignment settings.

First set Students submit in groups to Yes to turn your assignment into a group assignment.

Next click on the Show more… link to display all the group assignment settings.

Configuring your group assignment

1. Require group to make submission – If set to No, any student who has not been assigned a group will still be able to submit to the assignment. In this case their group will be shown as Default group. If set to Yes, students who have not been assigned a group will not be able to make a submission. You should think about how you want to handle the case of a student not being assigned a group.
2. Require all group members submit – When set to No the assignment is considered submitted as soon as one member of the group has submitted. After this, other group members will be able to see what has been submitted but they will not be able to submit anything themselves. If set to Yes, all members of the group will have to submit for the assignment to be considered submitted. At any particular time group members are able to see which other members have not submitted yet. All group members have the ability to edit the files being submitted e.g. if you allow more than one file to be submitted, each group member could add their own file as a contribution to the overall submission.
3. Grouping for student groups – You will need to use this setting if you have different types of group in your QMplus area and students may therefore be in more than one group. For instance, you may have lab groups and project groups and students work on different assignments in different groups. In this case, you will have to set up groupings in your QMplus area as well as groups. e.g. set up a Lab groups grouping which contains all your lab groups. You must then use this setting on your assignment to tell QMplus which of the groupings you want to use for this particular assignment.

Marking a group assignment

When you are marking a group assignment you can choose to assign the same grades and feedback to the whole group or you can assign them differently to different group members. You can also take a slightly hybrid approach of assigning a grade and feedback for the whole group and then editing it for an individual or individual(s), allowing you to deal with special circumstances.

Assigning the same grade to all group members

To apply the same grade and feedback to all members of the group, go to the online grading screen for any of the members of the group.

1. Assign your grade
2. Provide feedback
3. Select Yes to give the same grade and feedback to all group members.

Click Save. The same grade and feedback will be saved for each member of the group.

Assigning different grades to individuals

It is also possible to give different grades and feedback to individual group members.

1. Assign the grade – if you have already assigned a grade to the whole group, this grade will appear here and you can edit it.
2. Provide feedback – any feedback you assigned to the whole group will appear here and you can edit it.
3. Select No to ensure that the grade and feedback is only applied to this one student.

Produced by the the E-Learning Unit at Queen Mary University of London.