Exploring the Sense of Justice about Grades in Group Projects

The problem of free rider is ubiquitous in governing the commons. It often leads to injustice in allocating the rewards in any group projects. This paper investigates formal methods in which the instructor may adjust individual students’ grades relative to grades earned on a group project that reflect group members’ sense of justice. Data are collected from 77 college students enrolled in a sociology course.We estimate the just grade function for each and every rewardee student in each group, and show how to use these estimates to in their grade adjustments.We also engage a recent debate (Markovsky and Eriksson 2012; Jasso 2012) about how to measure the just reward.

This paper is motivated by two bodies of literature. The first one concerns the free rider problem ubiquitous in the social world when public goods are involved (Hardin 1968; Marwell and Ames 1979). Specifically, every instructor must have encountered the difficulty of how to determine individual students’ grades when they assign assignments to be completed and evaluated in groups. While many instructors may have treated it as a nuisance in their grading duties and proceed in various eclectic ways as long as the students do not complain, it is indeed an important issue to address if one takes seriously the idea of justice and the authoritative duty an instructor/grader performs. The second one concerns the social psychology of distributive justice (Berger et al. 1972; Deutcsh 1975; Jasso 1980; Konow 2003). Specifically, we argue that theoretical and methodological developments in this literature (Jasso 2007) may be applied to the free rider problem of allocating rewards to individuals participating in group projects. In this paper, we demonstrate such a particular application in the classroom context.