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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.
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[rcarty], admittedly peer assessment is known (although I've never been involved in it), but does it use this mechanism? |
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[jutta], nope, I've never been a teacher of a class that did essays. What's so hard about implementing it? |
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I swear I just responded to a comment (now deleted)by [jutta]... |
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Yeah, I read on to the place where you reduce the number of essays to rate to four, and that might be doable for a single person. A whole class full would be too much. |
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I've never been a teacher, either, but I've had to rate things. Like most people, I can confidently judge end points of the scale, but hearing the finer notes and rating e.g. two mediocre works relative to each other turned out to be very hard, especially if the authors have different styles. It's not like apples and oranges, more like fish stew and grapefruit sorbet. |
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//but does it use this mechanism?//
No, because frankly that's a bad mechanism. Peer Evaluations of essays usually involve marking rubrics that take such things as writing structure, spelling, grammar, coherence, reasoning and critical thinking, and proper referencing into account. |
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//more like fish stew and grapefruit sorbet// |
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Are they anything like pre-baked lasagne? |
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Essay assessment needs this sort of thing. Irrespective of talent or content, an essay should only be assessed on form, grammar, spelling and adherence to design. It's not the place of the lecturer to determine your mark as to whether they agree or disagree with you about your opinion of the subject. |
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so [rcarty], you have mfd this because its a bad mechanism of peer evaluation? |
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You'll also have to explain how standard peer evaluation that //involve marking rubrics// are superior to this method. |
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I agree with [UB], the opinion of the essay should not be judged, but the logic by which the writer draws conclusions. |
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[xavier], I've mfd'd because your idea is that "members of the class review each others essays", even though this is widely done with I'd imagine, a variety of marking schemes. The marking scheme you offered as an example is inferior to marking rubrics because it is entirely subjective. It is highly likely that an insightful, well written essay that is boring will be lower ranked by a class of students than a piece of garbage some clown wrote about boobies in l33t talk or internet slang. |
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Can I get a copy of it [rcarty]? |
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[rcarty], I disagree that the students would collectively vote for amusing yet poorly written essays. |
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Most students would have spent considerable time and effort writing their essays and would consequently appreciate others who had done the same. |
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I must admit I had in mind university/post-graduate students to use this system. |
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I'm a great believer in the 'wisdom of crowds' /democratic processes, and believe that (when set-up correctly) these processes will always give a fairer result than an individual assessment. |
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I'm still puzzled by what these 'marking rubrics' are, but it sounds like a formulaic way of assessing essays. Essays should be read and assessed 'as a whole' - if you think its a good essay - it is; no amount of dry analysis should dissuade you from this view. |
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in what way is this 'essay self-assessment' ? |
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[neilp], you're right. I should have titled it 'essay peer-assessment'... too late now though. |
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I've re-titled it. Apologies to anyone who clicked on it hoping for a new idea. |
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It is a good idea. It is done. It works better for college than high school, I think. I am looking forward to that essay by [rcarty] in l33t talk. |
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