Community posts
Sample Coursework Instructions & Marking Regime
by Andrew Dawson
The University of Nottingham
This year I'm on my 3rd year of using Peerwise to teach & evaluate students taking my Underground Construction course. The students have to set 5 questions for their peers and have to solve 25 set by their peers. I award 5% of the module assessment for setting (good!) questions and 5% for answering questions. Last year our Malaysia campus joined in with our UK campus with a common Peerwise coursework (so the students couldn't easily tell whether they were answering questions from another continent). This year our China campus should join in. The big benefit for me is speed of assessment - I can mark about 60 students an hour (provided I choose my on-line time OK !). The big benefit for the students is that they enjoy it!
I have posted sample coursework instructions and my notes to markers below. If you have any queries, I'll do my best to answer them.
Having run this a couple of times and refined how I do it, I thought the attached details of a summative coursework assessment using Peerwise might be useful more generally. 10% of my Underground Construction module’s mark is set aside for a piece of Peerwise work. 5% comes from a student setting 5 questions and 5% from solving 25 questions set by other students. With a large group (>150) and students in the UK, Malaysia and China all sitting the module, this is a very efficient way of giving them a meaningful task that they enjoy doing which, however, is easy to mark (I can mark one student a minute, I guess). The document includes both the instructions to students (issued via WebCT / Moodle) and an instruction to markers sheet so you can see how I do this. Hope it’s useful.