Why Use Peer Assessment?
There are several drivers for using peer assessment when reviewing group and team work activities.
- Assigning one mark to a group of students for a project is inherently unfair. Students commonly complain that their contributions are not being given the credit they deserve, and group members who didn’t pull their weight receive the same marks as those who contributed far more.
- It allows academics to better grade a student’s abilities against a range of key skills that will be expected to demonstrate as graduates, such as leadership, communication, report writing, etc.
- Peer review prompts students to reflect and assess their own abilities, as well of those of their team mates.
Why Use WebPA?
For academics WebPA:
- is easy to setup, run and reuse computerised assessments
- gives the ability to handle large class and group sizes, as well as any length of assessment
- calculates the final grade automatically
- the ability to change the way the scoring algorithm works and view the results immediately
- provides improved accuracy of the assessment marking as there is a reduced risk of transcribing errors or errors being introduced when manipulating data in spreadsheets
For students WebPA:
- provides assessments that can be taken at any time from anywhere
- allows time to be taken to consider submissions, as well as the opportunity go back and alter the scores until satisfied
- allows anonymous submissions.
