Teachers and teaching assistants are currently responsible for vast amounts of time-consuming assignment marking, which limits both the extent of feedback they are able to give and the amount of quality time they can spend with pupils. Peer evaluation is a potential alternative, because students can learn a lot from reviewing each other’s work but this process obviously needs to be closely managed and monitored, to ensure everyone is benefiting. Peergrade is a platform that does exactly that — enabling teachers to implement and manage peer reviews, so they can spend more time actually teaching.

To begin, schools or individual classes sign up for the Peergrade platform. Then, the teacher creates profiles for each student and adds a new task. Next, each student is assigned one of their peers’ work to mark. Pieces can be processed in any format and the student marks the work on the platform. Peergrade has multiple features to ensure it is a fair system, such as plagiarism detection and adjusted evaluations, which can spot which graders are biased or simply not as good at grading. Teachers can also add their own feedback, assign self-grading tasks and give feedback on the feedback itself — all of which the students can learn from.

How else could students be included in the teaching and graded process in a way that benefits their education?