Peer Reviews
Many of the courses I teach require some amount of team work. Since neither the teaching assistants nor I can directly observe how you and your partners work together, I usally ask you to "peer review" each other at some point. How often this is done depends on the particular course, so check the course website and discussion list for concrete announcements. Here I explain the general process and set some ground rules.
Summary
The goal of the "peer review" process is to evaluate the contributions you and your partners made to a particular assignment or project. Each one of you is going to evaluate everyone else, including yourself! You assign a score from 0% to 100% to everyone, including yourself. We average all the individual scores you receive, and that average is your final score.
Things to Ponder...
- Before sending in the scores, please take a moment to reflect on your team's work for the assignment or project you're evaluating. You shouldn't do anything "rash" since you don't want your partners to do that to you either, right?
- You should try to measure the genuine contributions of your partners to (a) the actual assignment or project and (b) to your own education.
- Don't assign a score based on how much you "like" somebody. Don't assign a score based on the "lines of code" somebody wrote. In short, don't assign a score based on any one particular thing. Think about all the things somebody did or didn't do.
- The person who found the most errors in your code, although you got angry at him or her for doing so, might deserve a higher score than the person who kept telling you that everything is okay.
- The person who insisted on discussing your ideas for hours to make sure they result in a good design, or the person who helped you along by providing literature sources, they all might have made a genuine contribution and thus deserve a good score from you.
- You should realize that a score of 50% is equivalent to an F (failing) grade, so you should certainly not use anything lower than 50% unless you have really good reasons.
- You should try to be as objective and honest as you possibly can. And if you can't decide between two scores, if you're struggling with this for too long, just give the benefit of the doubt and go with the higher score... :-)
Deliverables
Email the staff list of the course you're
performing the peer review for.
The subject should be
course-peer-number-login
where
course
is replaced with the course code (for example
cs102 or cs392),
number
is replaced with the number of the assignment or project (for
example 7 or final),
and
login
replaced by your login name
on the
ugradx.cs.jhu.edu
server.
For each person in your team, including yourself, send real name, login name, and a score from 0% to 100%. For scores between 80% and 100% you don't have to provide any additional comments. For scores lower than 80% please give a short summary of your reasons; stay objective and professional, don't start calling anyone names. And please make sure that you don't send your review to the wrong email address by mistake!
Grading
For reference, here is a short explanation of the grading criteria. We average all the individual scores you receive, and that average is your final score for the peer review. If you do not submit a score for a team mate it defaults to 100%. If you do not submit a score for yourself it defaults to 0%.
