Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who Is the Fairest of Them All?

Go back in time one thousand years and ask somebody what they look like: they will look at you bemused: How should I know? Ask the people around me! What was true for physical appearance before mirrors was just as true for personality before the age of diaries (1). But now we have mirrors and diaries, we have introspection, and we feel very sure that we are experts on our own selves. And so it is for that very personal activity: our writing. But a basketball player improves his game with a good coach, and a writer improves by receiving criticism.

Ideally then, professors toil over student papers providing insightful feedback. Equally ideally, students then pore over the comments to improve if not this essay, hopefully the next. In practice, it is when we rewrite that we learn to write: which means doing several iterations of grading. Sounds like death by a thousand small paragraphs?

A bit of crowd sourcing can come in handy for this situation. Have every student essay be critiqued by 5 peers, using both comments and numerical grades. The students then revise their draft and re-submit for a second peer evaluation. They also evaluate the comments they receive with a numerical grade and have the opportunity of responding to them. The SWoRD system (2) puts a smooth interface to streamline this whole process and has been extensively evaluated. Research suggests that comments from 5 peers are as reliable and as useful as comments from a single expert grader (although the students don’t believe this: anxiety about their grades coming from their peers is the main sticking point, but it is abated by the possibility of appealing to the professor for a grade review).

Typically, I take part as a student (I let the class know this): I submit an essay for the assignment, grade just a few papers, and receive feedback on my comments. Alternatively, I could give instructor grades for the assignments or leave some iterations to be entirely peer reviewed. So here we have a good mirror on the wall, to help everyone improve both their writing and their reviewing skills. Whether you want to be the jealous queen, Snow White or one of the dwarfs is up to you.

Benjamin de Foy, Saint Louis University. 15 Feb 2012.

1. “Orality and Literacy,” Walter J. Ong, 1982.

2. SWoRD, Christian Schunn and Kwangsu Cho, Peerceptiv