Essay peer-assessment

An essay is a good way of learning ‘in-depth’ about a subject, while also honing your writing skills and ability to think and argue clearly.

I find it frustrating that the end result of all that effort is only read by the teacher of the course (who’s probably not even interested in your essay, since they know the topic back-the-front).

I also find it worrying that the teacher of the course is solely responsible for marking the essay, and is therefore possible that their bias against your particular argument or writing style could lower your deserved mark.

I suggest that the members of the class review each other’s essays to resolve these problems.

This would have three advantages: reading other student’s essays is a good way of learning the subject; you’d be able to compare yourself to the class standard; and there’d be less chance for teacher’s bias.

It would be too onerous for every student to read and rank the essay of every other class member. Instead each student would be randomly assigned 4 essays to read and rank. Each essay would have the student’s name removed (and replaced with an ID code) so that bias against unpopular students would be minimised.

The students would simply rank (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th) the 4 essays. So every essay would be read and ranked 4 times. If an essay consistently gets rated highly, it would be fair to assume it’s a good essay, and if an essay is consistently rated poorly, it's probably a poor essay. An algorithm for ranking the intermediate essays would be easy to develop (I’ll throw in the suggestion of a Bayesian filter, since it’s fairly trendy these days). The algorithm would need to account for anomalous ratings that indicate students trying to exploit the system.

The teacher would then rank and mark all the essays. If there was any discrepancy between the students’ collective ranking and the teacher’s ranking, re-evaluation of those essays might be necessary.