Peer assessment is a method of grading students by letting the very students in the same course

read each other’s work and then give their peers the grades based on their own evaluations. This

approach seems to be of no use when it is just students judging students’ work but it is actually

more than that. In fact it is extremely beneficial to students and a productive tool for online

teaching. Take University of the People as an example, the process is used to promote numerous

skills for the students, since online studying requires the students to do basically most of their

studying by themselves so by applying this method, the University expects students to have more

chances in improving themselves as an active learning method not a traditional passive one.

As mentioned in the learning guide, at first students may find peer assessment as a chore rather

than a helpful way of learning new things. But later on, they will consider it as their opportunity

to enhance their capability. As pointed out on the website of Re-engineering Assessment

practices in Higher Education “Peer review develops important skills in students that help

enhance learning and understanding. Peer review also prepares students for life beyond

university as it helps develop their capacity to evaluate the quality and impact of their own work

and the work produced by others” (Research on peer review, n.d). We can see that the benefits of

peer assessment are huge for students since it boosts the process of learning and understanding

and it also spreads beyond the life of university to their work after graduating.

However there are a lot of challenges when applying peer assessment. The first one is that at first

students only consider it as a chore so they might not always give their peers a thorough

evaluation and that might result in unfair grades. The second one is that the majority of students

have low understandings towards the topic at the beginning so even if they try to do their

assessment in the best possible way, but they might still end up giving a false grade to their peers

due to their inability to comprehend the topic thoroughly. Still these problems can be properly
addressed by checking carefully by the professors and instructors. On the side of the students,

they have to face enormous challenges when assessing their peers’ work. Since everyone has

their own understanding towards a topic, they will encounter countless different opinions on the

topic and they have to read and even find a lot of research and documentaries to be able to

properly evaluate the papers, but it is also helpful for students since by doing so they will also

widen their understanding towards the topic. As for the receivers, they also have some challenges

especially in the case when they realize that their work is so inferior to other students or they

have so many errors or mistakes that even their peers can spot and give them advice on how to

fix them, it might give the students a lot of pressure at first, but if they keep an open mind and

absorb all the feedbacks and learn from them, it will prove helpful to their growth.

Since doing peer assessment can give students a lot of benefits. I myself consider it as an

indispensible tool for my studying. So every time I do an assessment, I always read the whole

work of the student first whether it is a written one or a post in the discussion section. For the

written paper, if it is the topic that I have no knowledge about, I will go on the Internet to read

about it first then come back to read it again when I can understand what the student has done,

then I search for grammar or any misspelled words since it is usually the criteria when assessing

a written one from my previous course. As for discussion post, I will ignore the grammar and

spelling mistakes, I will only focus on the idea, and the requirements for the post which are

usually word count and reference up until now.

In conclusion, doing peer review is necessary for my and all the students in University of the

People since we have to do a lot of self-studying so this will boost our speed of learning and help

us achieve a better understanding towards the discussed topic.

 Word count: 733

Reference:

Research on Peer Review. https://www.reap.ac.uk/PEER/Research.aspx