Do we need to grade students’ presentation skills?

University education has a strong focus on discipline knowledge, and employers’ surveys suggest that graduates do largely possess this knowledge. However, the same surveys also emphasise employers’ dissatisfaction with graduates’ teamwork and communication skills.

Team presentations provide an opportunity to develop these skills. In the past 20 years, I have trialled various forms of team presentation with alternative modes of team formation (free choice, set teams, randomised), presentation formats (live face-to-face, live Zoom and recorded video submissions), and marking schemes (including/excluding fluency, individual versus team marks, peer marks). Initially, the courses that included presentations were small, with 10 to 30 students, but over the past five years they included courses with up to 300 students, allowing me to observe more than 1,200 team presentations with over 2,400 students across three second-year courses.

Here I share insights I gained when designing team presentation assessments and marking or feeding back with the focus on developing presentation skills.

• Six tips on helping your students improve their teamwork skills
• Interactive learning: more than teamwork makes the dream work
• Revolving roles: creating inclusive, engaging, participant-led learning activities

What are presentation skills?

The content of a good presentation is designed for audience comprehension instead of information offloading. Let’s presume that students did prepare appropriate content. The perception of expertise will still be strongly affected by the delivery:

• Free speech versus reliance on notes. Everyone can read, thus reading undermines the perceived expertise.
• Appropriate language, jargon, grammar, pace, vocal variety and minimal use of filler words (ums and ahhs) makes listening more enjoyable.
• Confident body language such as positioning, movements (minimise nervous tics and own the room), eye contact, gestures to support talk and stay connected to slide set.

In combination with good content, these three dimensions of presentation performance affect the perception of true expertise, and it is perception that is important in job interviews, sales pitches and real-world project presentations.

What is the impact of marking?

It is tempting to mark the above dimensions of presentation performance as “feedback” on their achievement and to give students an incentive for effort. However, in my experience doing so results in three types of unintended consequences:

• It disadvantages certain student cohorts. It is harder for non-native speakers to present fluently than for native speakers. Similarly, students who have never presented in front of an audience can suffer panic attacks. Should these students be anxious about losing marks? Should they apply for a medical exception? Of course not! Students who are worried about presenting in front of a critical audience benefit the most from this exercise, gaining confidence and building resilience.
• There is a degree of subjectivity. For example, body language is in part a matter of taste and fashion. Should students lose marks if they put their hands in jeans pockets during presentations? What about one hand in the pocket while wearing a suit? What is too little, just right or too much hand gesturing? How about feet movements?
• Marking undermines students’ openness to constructive criticism at feedback time. In the quest for marks, students challenge the feedback instead of trying to learn about their strengths and weaknesses.

What happened once presentation skills were not marked?

Without marks, the atmosphere during the feedback session became much more welcoming.

Students’ effort remained high when presenting to a live audience of peers in combination with a strict no-notes and no-reading-of-slides rule. This is consistent with John Biggs and Catherine Tang’s idea that peer audience motivates due to the chance for ego enhancement.

This incentive is missing in the case of pre-recorded videos, where the delivery by many students was lacklustre reading of an off-camera script. Thus, the live aspect with audience’s reactions is essential.

But wait, there is more!

Over the years, I noted a tendency of students to circumvent the no-reading rule by memorising detailed scripts. Similarly, some students appear to choose live Zoom presentations to hide their notes. No amount of explaining that “delivery skills” are not marked and that scripts deprive them from the opportunity to practice free speech, and thus the ability to adjust to interrupting questions in a safe environment, was helping against this trend.

To counter this trend, I started to emphasise that while not explicitly marked, very poor delivery in terms of excessively fast pace, long sentences and complexity overload – all of which are typical of memorised scripts – are reducing the comprehensibility and thus the content mark. In combination with marked Q&A sessions, this has to some degree reversed the memorisation trend.

In summary, the excitement of a live audience provides sufficient motivation for students to work on their presentation skills. The absence of grading for 21st-century skills increases equity, eases anxiety and improves the uptake of feedback.

Axel Wieneke is a lecturer in the School of Economics at the University of Queensland.

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