MAILING LISTS

One thing I have not seen discussed in this great trail on peer evaluation
is undergrad vs. grad.  In my experience, the overwhelming majority of those
who participate in this list are teaching to grad students who are in
professional schools.  That's a different student from teaching undergrads,
particularly those in first/second year required courses.  Yet, the the
latter students too need to learn to work in teams.  In my experience they
are most likely to be critical of slackers.  So what do I do for Peer
Evaluation?

I ask my students to imagine they are their team's supervisor doing an
annual evaluation.  They are asked to write down high quality commentary on
both what each team member's positive contributions to the team and to the
team's work have been as well as areas needing improvement.  Students are
then asked to grade each team member.  I evaluate the quality of their
evaluations for 75% of the peer evaluation grade and average the grades each
student receives from his/her peers for 25% of their peer evaluation grade.
Yes, it's quite a bit of work and I have yet to try iPeer to help automate
it (though I do collect the data via an on-line survey).  However, it is
both more realistic (everyone has to be evaluated by our superiors and we
cannot pretend all evaluations will be equal) and I collect great data for
the inevitable requests for student recommendations later on.

Sarah J. Mahler
Associate Professor
Global & Sociocultural Studies
Florida International University
Miami, Florida  33199  USA