Thanks to their well-documented benefits, team projects are increasingly popular as a valuable learning/teaching tool in higher education. Fully realizing such benefits, however, is predicted on the presumption of no free riding. Hence, a suitably designed assessment method for team projects should ex ante discourage free riding before project commencement and ex post punish free riders when such behavior is found to exist upon project completion. This paper documents the empirics of a newly developed Online Assessment System for Individual Scores (OASIS) implemented by teachers of nine courses across five universities in the U.S., Hong Kong and India. Its key findings are as follows. First, OASIS encourages student participation in a team project through its contractual commitment and contribution-score relationship. Second, OASIS identifies and quantifies the extent of free ridership via negotiation in an end-of-project meeting among team members, thereby generating mutually agreed peer assessment data for individual scoring. Third, OASIS uses the peer assessment data to determine a team member’s relative contribution based on median estimation, which is less susceptible to gaming and outlier biases than the alternative of mean estimation. Finally, OASIS automatically assigns individual scores to members of a project team based on their estimated relative contributions and the project’s overall score set by a teacher, yielding individual scores that obey the principles of fairness and due diligence in academic assessment. Lending support to these findings is the continued interest in using OASIS of all participating teachers for their future courses. Further, student surveys indicate that OASIS can improve student perception on the educational value of team projects. Hence, OASIS deserves serious consideration by teachers worldwide who are already or consider using team projects in their teaching courses in different disciplines. Copyright © 2018 Multidisciplinary Journals.

Purpose: A team member might exert little effort and exploit teammates’ work (free riding), which can discourage their efforts. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether free riding devalues team projects and whether an online assessment system for individual scores (OASIS) system can reduce student perceptions of free riding and its harmful effects. OASIS includes: contractual commitment, team discussion, median peer assessment of each member’s contribution, assessment revision opportunities, conditional teacher participation and final appeal.
Design/methodology/approach: University students (238 in India and 60 in Hong Kong) completed pre-and post-surveys.
Findings: Students who valued team projects more than others experienced fewer past free riders, viewed team members as contributing equally, or viewed free riding as harming fair grading. After OASIS, these students reported that only 3 percent of their teammates were free riders, and were less likely to perceive that free riders had harmed them or hindered fair grading. Results did not differ across gender or regions.
Research limitations/implications: These data are correlational rather than longitudinal, and hence cannot determine causality.
Practical implications: The OASIS system requires a computer.
Originality/value: This is the first study to test a system for reducing free riders across countries. Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited.