Group Grades, Individual Accountability, and a Student With Dysgraphia in a STEM Design Course

The problem is structural: a 60% team weight means a student's grade can be determined largely by teammates' work, which makes the grade an unreliable measure of what any individual knows. The fix is to keep the team task but change what is graded and how it is verified.

• Shift the weight. Move individual evidence to roughly 60–70% of the grade, drawn from artifacts each student produces alone: a short design-rationale write-up, a labeled sketch with a force/torque explanation, and an oral defense where the teacher asks 'why did you change the axle position?' Each of these is quick to score and hard to fake.
• Add an individual accountability structure inside the team task. Assign named roles with visible deliverables (chassis, drive train, testing log, revision memo), and require each student to sign a specific section of the journal.
• Use in-progress checks, not just the finished product. Two short spot-checks during the build make contribution visible while there is still time to intervene, rather than at grading time when it is too late.

The redesign preserves the collaborative engineering work - which is the point of the course - while ensuring a grade can be defended as a statement about a particular student.

The construct being assessed is engineering reasoning, not handwriting speed or written transcription. A blank journal therefore tells us almost nothing about Eli's learning, and grading it as-is would be scoring the disability.

The test for any accommodation is whether it changes the construct. Substituting an oral defense, a scribed journal, or speech-to-text does not alter the reasoning being evaluated, so all three are legitimate. Reducing the number of revisions Eli must document, or grading him only on the prototype, would change the construct and would be a modification, appropriate only if the IEP team documented that decision.

Practically: I would sit with Eli, use the conversation he already had with me as evidence (documented in my own notes with a date), and immediately set up a route for the remaining work - voice-recorded design notes or a scribe during the revision cycle. Then I would call the case manager to confirm this is consistent with the IEP and to ask whether assistive technology is already listed. If speech-to-text is available, the accommodation should be in place for the rest of the quarter, not just for the final artifact, so Eli gets practice with it.

The judgment worth naming: a blank product plus a clear oral explanation is a signal to check the assessment's accessibility, not a signal that the student did not do the work.

A failed prototype is not a failed design process, and the journal in this team shows three reasoned revisions - which is arguably stronger evidence of the targeted learning than a team whose vehicle worked on the first try because a parent helped. The rubric should already have been rewarding iteration; if a team can fail every trial and still earn a low grade, the rubric is measuring outcomes the course does not actually teach.

So: grade the process evidence highly for the individual artifacts - the revision rationale, the testing log, the ability to explain what was changed and why - and grade the final product's performance on a modest scale. I would also add a short reflection prompt for that team ('your vehicle did not meet the criterion; what would you change and what evidence supports that?') and count it, since explaining a failure is a real engineering skill and the assessment should capture it.

The broader lesson is that the rubric needs a stated distinction between product performance and design reasoning before the unit starts. Discovering that distinction at grading time means the students were assessed against criteria they could not have known, which is both unfair and a source of appeals.