The Calculation of the Final Grade

The table at the foot of the screen shows the final grade for each student for this assignment. Their grade is made up from three components.

1. The teacher's grade for their submitted work.
2. The average of the peer grades for their submitted work. This can optionally include the teacher's grade. This grade would be included if the number of peer gradings is very low or it is thought that the peer gradings are suspect either because of bias (usually on the high side) or for not being reliable. If included the teacher's grade is treated in the same way as a peer grade in the calculation of the average.
3. A grade for the student's performance in the peer grading phase. This performance is based by (a) if their grades are,on average, too high or too low (this is called bias), (b) if their grades follow, again on average, the grades given by the other students (and that of the teacher if included) (this is called reliability) and (c) on the quality of their feedback to the other students, this is graded explicitly by the teacher in the top half of the page. These three are weighted by the factors 1:2:3 respectively in the calculation of the "grading" grade. In other words the teacher's grading of the comments is given the same weight as the Bias and Reliability factors combined.

These three components can be weighted as deemed appropriate for the assignment. For example the teacher's grade might be weighted strongly if the peer grading part of the assignment is only considered a minor part of the assignment as a whole. Alternatively, if no teacher grading is done at all then the teacher's grades should be given a zero weighting. If the assignment is all about the students as judges and the providing of feedback then first two components may be set to zero (or low) and the students' grading abilities will dominate the final grades.

Note that this screen is used iteratively and the final grades are not normally made available to the students until all the grades for the comments have been entered AND the component weights (for the teacher's grades, the peer grades and grading performance) have been finalised. Once these two separate tasks have been done then the final grades can be made available to the students.