Peer Assessment
Peer Assessment is a process where you, as a learner, evaluate assignments of your peers and provide feedback. The work you invest will pay off: You will improve your understanding of the course material by seeing and grading the work of others. Your grade is calculated based on the grades you receive from your peers and bonus points you collect. It is important that you adhere to all deadlines; otherwise your work will not earn any points.
Peer Assessment Phases
1 Submit your work.
- The complexity of the tasks in a peer assessment can range from simple open response questions, e.g. in the form of “Explain why …” to quite complex projects, such as “Program the Pong game in Javascript and provide a lab report that documents all your steps with a particular focus on the problems you’ve encountered”.
- Be sure to submit your solution before the submission deadline, otherwise your work will not be evaluated and will not earn any points.
- The system is rather merciless when it comes to deadlines. Please make sure not to submit in the last minute as temporary load peeks might cause technical issues, which do not count as an excuse.
- Also be aware of the time zone differences.
2 Train your grading skills (optional).
- In this step you can train your grading skills by assessing a sample submission that is provided by the instructors.
- The instructors also have already graded these submissions, so that you will be able to compare your grades against the grades the teachers would have expected.
3 Evaluate your peers.
- During this phase you grade randomly assigned submissions of your peers (usually 3 to 5). Grading is done anonymously and is based on criteria provided by the instructor. You also need to provide written feedback.
- Participation in the Evaluate your peers phase is required if you want your own submission to be evaluated and considered for points. Make sure that you adhere to the deadline.
4 Evaluate yourself (optional).
- Some assignments include a self-evaluation. During this phase you reflect and evaluate your own work after you have seen the submissions of your peers.
- As always, make sure that you adhere to the deadlines.
Learn about
Adhering to deadlines
Peer assessment is based on the students adhering to deadlines (for example submitting work and reviewing peers’ work on time). Check carefully and adhere to all deadlines, otherwise you will receive no points.
Privacy and sharing your work
Your identity will not be shared with your peers. Please keep your submission and review free of personal data if you want to keep your privacy. In some courses, challenge winners and top submissions are published and names of these best students are displayed.
Grading
Peer assessments are scored by criteria. A number of peers rate a learner’s response by each of the required criteria. The learner’s score for a particular criterion is the median of all scores that each peer assessor gave that criterion. For example, if the Ideas criterion in a peer assessment receives a 10 from one peer, a 7 from a second peer, and an 8 from a third peer, the Ideas criterion’s score is 8.
For example, a response might have received the following scores from peers:
| Criterion Name | Peer 1 | Peer 2 | Peer 3 | Median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ideas (out of 10) | 10 | 7 | 8 | 8 |
| Content (out of 10) | 7 | 9 | 8 | 8 |
| Grammar (out of 5) | 4 | 4 | 5 | 4 |
To calculate the final score for the response, add the median scores that were given for each criterion, as follows.
Ideas median (8/10) + Content median (8/10) + Grammar median (4/5) = final score (20/25)
As the final scores are calculated by criteria, not by individual assessor, the score for the response is not the median of the scores that each individual peer assessor gave the response. Just to show the difference, for the example above, the final score as the sum of the rubrics’ medians is 20/25. If the median of the individual assessors’ scores were used. It would be (20, 21, 21) => 21.