ISSUES IN ACCOUNTING EDUCATION American Accounting Association Vol. 29, No. 1 DOI: 10.2308/iace-50637 2014 pp. 169–180 Taking the Guesswork Out of Assessing Individual Contributions to Group Work Assignments Susan C. Lambert, Amanda J. Carter, and Margaret Lightbody ABSTRACT: This paper demonstrates how a wiki can be used to deliver greater justice in the form of a fairer grade to students who report that not all members of their group made a reasonable contribution to an assignment. While group assessment has many pedagogical and professional benefits, it is fraught with potentially unjust outcomes in terms of the marks assigned to individual students. Free-riders can unjustly receive marks for work that they have not contributed to and they may even drag down the group marks due to their non-performance. We describe how a wiki was used in an auditing group assignment to provide evidence of individual student contributions following reports of unequal contributions by group members. It was found that the wiki provided a relatively more objective basis than traditional document-based assignments to inform the decision as to whether or not all students in the group would receive the same grade and if not, how the grades should be modified. Keywords: wiki; group assessment; free-rider; justice; auditing assignment; accounting education; group work; procedural justice; distributive justice. INTRODUCTION E mployers want accounting graduates to possess a range of generic and technical attributes, including teamwork skills (Ballantine and Larres 2007, 2009; Bloch, Brewer, and Stout 2012; Bryant and Albring 2006; De Lange, Jackling, and Gut 2006; Hancock et al. 2010; Kavanagh and Drennan 2008; Matherly and Burney 2010). Higher education literature supports the use of group assignments to build a student’s teamwork skills (Hilton and Phillips 2010; Kennedy and Dull 2008; Rue ¨l and Bastiaans 2003; Tempone and Martin 1999) and to enhance learning by doing and through feedback (Race 2000). Accordingly, opportunities for students to develop teamwork skills are built into accounting programs and, to encourage their engagement with such activities, the output of those activities is assessed (Ramsden 1992). The problem is that students may not be rewarded appropriately for their contributions (Gammie and Matson 2007; Plastow, Spiliotopoulou, and Prior 2010; Trentin 2008; Underwood 2003), and students who fail to make Susan C. Lambert is an Associate Professor, Amanda J. Carter is a Research Associate, and Margaret Lightbody is an Associate Professor, all at the University of South Australia. Editor’s note: Accepted by William R. Pasewark Published Online: October 2013 169