A few people have asked my colleague, Lucia Otoyo, and I, for more information about the Peer Review Mechanism we use to moderate individual student contributions to our group work assessment for  our Law & Technology module. Both of us teach at London South Bank University, UK.

When we first developed the module, one of our aims was that we should offer a taste of the world of work to our soon to be graduating, final year students. Accordingly, it made sense that the main assessment should be a groupwork task. We wanted to make the point that employers and clients don’t care whose fault it is that a project fails, they expect the team to take collective responsibility for delivering the project successfully. Understandably, the first cohort of students pushed back at this, raising concerns about ‘free riders’; why should a student who has not attended and contributed very much get the benefit of everyone’s else hard work, especially as they have made that work harder by not contributing?

We discussed the issues with our students and agreed to use a peer-review mechanism to moderate the variable contributions of different team members. Essentially, when students submit their final group coursework, they are all asked to evaluate themselves and their teammates against 5 criteria (Attendance, Contribution, Completion of tasks, Attitude and Listening), scoring each one from 1-5. An algorithm then redistributes the groupwork mark (say 60%) between the members of the team, depending on whether their personal average peer review score is higher or lower than the average mark for the group as a whole. The effect is that a team member recognised by their teammates as having made a superior contribution will get a mark higher than 60%. Equally, a team member judged by their teammates to have been a ‘free-rider’, failing to make a fair contribution, will get less than 60%.

How the peer-review mechanisms works is fully explained and illustrated in this post from our Blog: Andy is a Robot and I am not sure about Lucia – https://andyisarobotandiamnotsureaboutlucia.wordpress.com/2024/11/08/peer-review-mechanism/

Please get in touch if you have any questions, Best wishes, Associate Professor, Andy Unger, London South Bank University.