Peer grading of papers

If you have ever graded a paper or reviewed a manuscript for publication you know how helpful that process is to your own writing skills.  Students can also learn by reviewing.  Here are some guidelines that can help you incorporate peer review into your courses.

There are several important rules for using peer review.

  1.  The students need a guide (see Developing a Rubric) on how to review, what they are looking for, and how to best help another student author improve their work.  Students are often shy about criticizing another students papers.  This exercise is not about criticizing but about reshaping student papers.
  2. Students need enough time to do a good job on reviewing a paper.
  3. The author of the paper needs to get credit for changes they might make from another students comments.
  4. All students need to know that the faculty member gives the final grade for each assignment and that grade is not shared with anyone except the student author.

Presentation about PeerGrading by Carly Vollet (2010) retrieved from (PeerGrading ORMATYCRevisedVollet-2.pdf) on January, 2012.