Peer Assessment by Ranks

Peer assessment is a teaching technique in which students assess each other's work. It can help students to learn and engage with the quality criteria of their subject, and to see their own work as others see it. However, they may have numerous anxieties about fairness, about any extra work involved, about their abilities to assess fellow students, and to be assessed by them. Twenty-one students were assigned a task to rank some designs from a previous class. They put the designs in order of value so that they only had to judge the designs in comparison to each other, and not to some imagined universal standard that they hardly know. The assignment allowed students to give their answers both formally, as a ranked order; and textually, so they could explain and justify their rankings. This mix permits automatic marking schemes to be applied, and we tested two. One is a standard, used quite commonly in multi-choice tests because it is simple. The second refines it, intending to give more accurate results for ranked questions. Results confirm this ranking task is shown to be viable. It gets over some of the problems with peer assessment, and gives students a new learning experience with its own set of advantages.