Collaborative learning and group projects are integral to Software Engineering (SE) education as they help prepare students for professional environments where teamwork and collective problem-solving are crucial. Accurately assessing individual contributions within the group project setting remains a significant challenge. Traditional assessment methods often fail to distinguish between individual efforts and collective achievements, particularly in team-based assignments prevalent in SE courses.

This paper explores how several factors potentially affect individual participation in group programming projects. We compare metrics for evaluating individual contributions and examine the effect of group formation strategies on collaborative practices. Our data consist of the collaborative artifacts of 77 teams and peer evaluation responses from 154 students across two semesters of a graduate-level software engineering course, providing insights into several research questions, including the effectiveness of different metrics for estimating individual contributions, the distribution of programming tasks among students, and the impact of group composition on task distribution and peer evaluations.