The Peer Assessment activity:
- Allows students to participate in the assessment process and encourages engagement with their own learning.
- Promotes fairness in group work by asking group members themselves, who know best about the level of contribution by other group members, to compare the contributions of each group member and reward significant contributions with a higher peer mark.
- Encourages group participation as students know that their own contribution to the group work will be assessed by their peers.
In the Peer Assessment activity, students work together in groups to submit a collaborative piece of work. Each member of the group then assesses the other group members on their individual performance and contribution to the group activity by providing a mark out of 5 and adding comments on each student. The lecturer marks the submitted work and this mark is adjusted for each student based on a calculation involving the group mark, the group average peer grade and the average of each student’s individual peer grades.
As a result of recent development work, groupings can now be used with peer assessment, meaning that students can be in more than one group on a module, which was not previously possible. Using groupings also means that peer assessment can just be applied to certain groups of students on a module.
In addition, there are now two possible options that can be selected to calculate the students’ final grades, Simple and Outlier.
Simple uses the actual peer grades together with the mark awarded by the lecturer to calculate each student’s final grade. Outlier uses standard deviation to remove any large inconsistencies between peer grades from the calculation. It also smooths out minor differences between grades. With both options, the individual student’s final grade could be lower or higher than the group mark awarded by the lecturer if the average of the student’s peer grades is lower or higher than the group average peer grade.
A Peer Assessment activity can be set up in a Moodle module in the same way as other activities are added to Moodle. Ensure groups and groupings are set up on the module before the activity is added.
Our guidance site provides more information on setting up a Peer Assessment Activity, adding grades and feedback to a Peer Assessment Activity and Groups and Groupings.
