Experiments have been carried out on six composite and two plain steel plate girders under shear loading to understand the elastic and inelastic behaviour of such girders. The failure mechanism assumed and used to develop design equations is normally based on the failure patterns observed in the experiments. Therefore, different types of cracks and failure patterns observed in the experiments are reviewed briefly first. Based on the observed failure patterns, a design method to predict the ultimate shear capacity of composite plate girders is proposed in this paper. The values of ultimate shear capacity obtained using the proposed design method are compared with the corresponding experimental values and it is found that the proposed method is able to predict the shear capacity accurately.