Peer assessment of competence

TLDR

Peer assessment is widely used to evaluate technical and non‑technical professional competence, but its reliability, validity, and the influence of relationships, stakes, and equivalence make generalisations difficult. Peers are asked to judge structured tasks or provide global impressions, with assessments collected on action performance, quality, and suitability. The quality of peer assessments depends on reliability, relationships, stakes, and equivalence, and because of the wide variety of uses and competencies, outcomes can be good or bad depending on implementation.

Abstract

This instalment in the series on professional assessment summarises how peers are used in the evaluation process and whether their judgements are reliable and valid.The nature of the judgements peers can make, the aspects of competence they can assess and the factors limiting the quality of the results are described with reference to the literature. The steps in implementation are also provided.Peers are asked to make judgements about structured tasks or to provide their global impressions of colleagues. Judgements are gathered on whether certain actions were performed, the quality of those actions and/or their suitability for a particular purpose. Peers are used to assess virtually all aspects of professional competence, including technical and non-technical aspects of proficiency. Factors influencing the quality of those assessments are reliability, relationships, stakes and equivalence.Given the broad range of ways peer evaluators can be used and the sizeable number of competencies they can be asked to judge, generalisations are difficult to derive and this form of assessment can be good or bad depending on how it is carried out.