Five years of extra credit in a studio-based course: An effort to incentivize socially useful behavior
Edward F. Gehringer, Zhewei Hu, Yang Song · 2016
In studio-based education, students collaboratively work on projects that allow them to learn aspects of design through experience on authentic artifacts, often for outside clients. In our Object-Oriented Design and Development class, this means work on open-source projects, such as Mozilla Servo, OpenMRS, Sahana Eden, and Apache Ambari, as well as our own Expertiza project. This paper recounts five years of experience awarding extra credit for activity that students engaged in to help fellow students. These activities included doing extra peer reviews of classmates' work, helping other teams with their projects, writing various types of quiz questions, and answering questions on the Piazza message board. The incentives often led to “gaming” behavior, where students engaged in activities simply to earn points, with very little benefit to their fellow students. Consequently, the scoring policy has been changed several times during the five-year period. We show how student behavior changed as the rules changed, how we have enhanced review quality, improved responses and response time on Piazza, and transitioned students away from merely helping with project setup, and toward helping other students with the substance of their projects.