Peer assessment: judging the quality of students’ work by comments rather than marks

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a study into the quality of peer feedback provided by students within a computerised peer‐assessment environment. The study looks at the creation of a ‘feedback index’ that represents the quality of an essay based upon the feedback provided during a peer‐marking process and identifies a significant positive correlation between this index and the average marks produced for an essay. The data produced are analysed in an attempt to ascertain whether specific groups of students, based upon their ability in developing an essay within this subject area, in general tend to mark and/or comment on their peers either too generously or too critically.