Lots of Updates to the Peer Assessment Tool

July 22, 2014 | 2 Minute Read

Since we introduced the Peer Assessment tool in CoursePlus in March, there have been a handful of courses which have used this tool to allow students to assess and grade each other's work. We've received some excellent feedback on the functionality and user experience of the Peer Assessment tool, and have been making subtle tweaks to the tool since its release. As of the summer term, however, we've added a few more noticeable changes to the Peer Assessment tool:

• The Peer Assessment tool now sends a "confirmation of assessment submission" email to students when they complete and submit an assessment.
• Faculty and TAs can see a preview of the results email that will be sent to students before that results email is sent.
• An option to add an “Additional Comments and Feedback” row to a rubric is now available. There are no boxes to click and no points to assign in this row. It there only as an open comments/feedback box for the person filling out the rubric.
• You can now add students to a peer assessment after it has opened. In the case of group assignments, students will be added into their groups and will be assigned as part of that group. In the case of self-assesments and faculty assessments, students are simply added to the assessment like any other student. In the case of random assignments, faculty or TAs are required to manually assign students added to the assessment after it has opened to other students.
• Students who do not enter comments for each criteria in a peer assessment are now told that they must do so.
• Auditors are now excluded from being assigned assessments in the random assignment assessment type.
• Emails sent from the Peer Assessment tool now include the course number in the subject, and will alternatively use the course short if the course is not a course in the SPH course catalog.
• When you click on a cell in a rubric to edit the text therein, the cursor now auto-focuses in the rich text editor.
• When you edit a rubric, you can now see a substantial list of example rubrics in a new window.

We hope that all of these changes — all suggested by faculty and TAs — make the experience of the Peer Assessment tool a better one.

If you have questions about the Peer Assessment tool and how to incorporate it into your classes, please contact an instructional designer in the Center!