Section 3.

You will hear two students called Sally and Steve discussing Sally's project on
peer assessment, a system where students mark each other's work. First you have some
time to look at questions 21-24 on page 5. Now listen carefully and answer questions 21-
24. I can't believe you're still in the library Sally. You've been here all day. Are you still
working on your peer assessment project? Hi Steve. Yes, I'm still here and I'm nowhere
near finished. I'm still processing the reading I've done on peer assessment. I'm interested
to see if students marking each other's work is beneficial. I know a lot of the other students
are pretty skeptical about its value as a way of assessing their performance. They think the
tutors are in favour of it because they don't have to spend so long marking. But I disagree. I
think we can learn a great deal from it. Yes, I can see one advantage being that it saves time
spent going over things in class. Well, initially it doesn't seem to work that way and it can
be quite a time consuming business because sometimes things have to be marked again if
the tutor thinks the students' assessments aren't reliable. The real game is the fact that the
students learn to stand back and assess their own assignments objectively because they're
much more familiar with the marking system. Yes, I can see that. It gives them an
opportunity to reflect on their own performance. And how do they feel about having
another student mark their work? Is that good for rapport? In some cases, yes. In some
cases, no. I think more research is needed to answer that question. What happens if a tutor
notices that the marks for a particular assignment seem wrong? Should the students mark
them again? That might not make any difference. So in that case, the tutor would have to
remark all those assignments and then go through the marking criteria really carefully with
the students on the next assignment with some sample answers. Right. I've been reading
about a research project on peer assessment. The researchers invited a group of students
from two different universities to attend a one-day conference. They also invited some
university lecturers to attend. Each student gave a short presentation on a project of their
choice. Each of these presentations was assessed individually by all the participants, both
students and lecturers. To support their marking, they used a set of assessment guidelines
that had been prepared the day before by a random selection of students. Before you hear
the rest of the discussion, you have some time to look at questions 25 to 30 on page 6. Now
listen and answer questions 25 to 30. So were the student markers reliable? Well,
comparisons were made between certain categories of student markers and the group as a
whole, including the lecturers. The findings showed that there were some variations in the
way different groups marked. Gender did come into play, for example. I expect the male
students were more generous when marking female presenters were they? Quite the
reverse, actually. They were harder on the female presenters than on the males. Which
wasn't what I'd expected either. Did female students show any bias towards male
presenters? Interestingly not. So does that suggest women are fairer and more reliable
markers than men? Well, I wouldn't go that far. It's only a small sample. But significantly,
the results showed that when women marked other women, this didn't affect the grades
they gave. Hmm. What about age? Were you able to come to any conclusions about that?
Yes, because we had some mature students presenting and we found the marks awarded to
them by their younger peers were rather more generous. I wonder why that is. Now, you
said there were groups of students from two universities. Did they tend to favour students
making presentations from their own universities? It didn't seem to influence marking one
way or the other, which is quite encouraging. We've been interested to see if students'
personal relationships affected their objectivity. One striking variation though was in the
students who'd been asked to help devise the criteria for the marking scheme. They were
actually the toughest markers of all, marking consistently below the tutors. Really? Well, it
sounds as if it's generated lots of useful data. I expect you'll be here for a day. That is the
end of section 3. You now have half a minute to check your answers. Now turn to section 4
on page 7.