Peer review is a type of assignment, where the submission is checked manually according to a number of guidelines. Usually, this type of assignment works well for open essays or programming assignments, that can't be checked with automated grading software. Peer review assignment is not a separate step, you can add it to any existing assignment.
The most popular types of assignments for the peer review:
- Open answer (an essay or a proof of a theorem);
- Programming assignments (code review).
After adding a review, Rules of reviewing will appear at the bottom of the settings:
Rules for points and grading procedure settings
- The instructor sets the number of points a learner can get for completing an assignment.
- The instructor sets the number of points according to all the listed criteria.
- A learner gets a median of all the grades for different characteristics. If the submission got a lot of reviews, the grade will be calculated based on the first three reviews.
- The learner gets the grade for the entire step, which is calculated according to the maximum number of points one could get for completing the assignment.
For example, there is a step with peer review, where the overall number of points once can get is 2, however, the number of points for all the criteria added together is 10. If a learner gets three reviews, where she received 6, 7 and 8, then first she gets the grade 7 (median of the numbers 6,7,8), which is 70% from the maximum number of points on 3 criteria of 10. The final grade will be 70 % from 2, therefore 1,4.
Please note that as soon as you get at least one review, you can only make changes in the fields 'Additional information' and the field 'Grade criteria'. However, you will not be able to change the maximum number of points for each criterion and the number of obligatory reviews.
During the peer review process, learners sometimes report the following issues:
- Technical issues: impossible to see the answer, click the button, etc. If you encounter such issues, please contact us at support@stepik.org.
- Issues concerning the peer review itself. Learners might not be happy about the grade they got, may accuse someone of plagiarism. Only you can fix these issues by communicating with learners.
- Sometimes the learners forget to attach a file or send it in a wrong format or would like to change their submission. These types of issues can not be solved by either you as an instructor nor we as a platform can delete the submission or edit it.
Please note that instructor review is only available for paid and Enterprise courses. For open courses, only peer-review for Learners and Instructors is available.