In her online essay “How to Crowdsource grading,” Cathy Davidson describes the problem with the conventional grading system in schools and offers her solution. Davidson shares that she “can't think of a more meaningless, superficial, cynical way to evaluate learning in a class on new modes of digital thinking (including rethinking evaluation) than by assigning a grade” (Davidson). She explains how grading from the professor makes learning into too much of a competition. Instead of encouraging students to be curious and enjoy learning, conventional grading makes them try to figure out how to get the best grade while doing the least amount of work, which is the complete opposite goal of schooling.
Her solution lies in a peer-to-peer grading system. Davidson encourages a point system where her commentary as well as peer review will amount to the grade. She says, “you do the assignment satisfactorily, you get the points. Add up the points, there's your grade. Clearcut. No guesswork. No second-guessing 'what the prof wants.' No gaming the system. Clearcut. Student is responsible” (Davidson). The only problem with this method is the question of how you judge quality. Davidson answers this question with her description of “crowdsourcing.” In her classroom, two students lead discussion every day. All the students can read all the class blogs and pass judgment on whether the blogs posted by their fellow classmates meet the standards of the class. The students can also revise their contributions if they receive a negative review. Davidson argues that, “what this teaches my students is responsibility, credibility, judgment, honesty, and how to offer good criticism to one's peers--and, in turn, how to receive it” (Davidson).
In this digital age, crowdsource grading provides a more meaningful and effective learning environment for students, in Davidson’s opinion. She offers support for her argument by stating that there are multiple studies showing that students perform better in the classroom when they are aware that their grade depends on peer evaluation, more so than when they are just submitting assignments to a teacher. Davidson says, I think it is because grading, in a curious way, exemplifies our deepest convictions about excellence and authority, and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes excellence. If we “crowdsource grading,” we are suggesting that those without authority can also determine excellence. That is what happens in the non-refereed world of the Internet, that’s what digital thinking is, and it is quite revolutionary” (Davidson). Cognition has to be interpreted differently in a “customizing, process-oriented, collaborative online public environment” (Davidson). She emphasizes the importance of individuals contributing to the whole of a group and how this kind of new grading scale will prepare students more adequately for the future in the ever-advancing online, collaborative environment.
One of the problems with this approach to grading is that it seems like this system couldn’t apply to a larger classroom. With large classes, like the ones at UT that have 100-400 people in them, how could a teacher possibly keep track of who has commented on whose blog post and who voted yes or no to their peer-led discussion. If someone can come up with a good, legitimate way for this process and avoid students from forming teams to cheat the system, then I think this grading system is a great idea. How could this system apply to a large classroom?
One of the other problems I can see with crowdsourcing is the validity of student grading. Not all students have a severely critical eye, and there can and will be cases where students will simply go "I'll give you all As if you all give me an A" and go from there. I don't think this could work in a large classroom because it would likely amplify the problem, but even in small ones this sort of method should be taken with a grain of salt.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I absolutely despise the concept of large classes. Unless they have small discussion sections to accompany them, I feel that such large classes mostly teach us to memorize inert knowledge (better known as bs), which I think is pretty useless unless you're a professional Jeopardy! player or something. I think for a crowdsourcing grading system to really take off, the entire higher education system will have to be reformed. For one, I don't think we can have huge classes. Instead, I feel that we'll have to return to more classical roots. By this I mean Socratic methodology and much more peer-to-peer and peer-to-instructor contact.
ReplyDeleteChinchin touched on something that's really important: limiting the size of the groups that engage in the academic process. The solution to a large class scenario would be breaking up the peer grading into small sections. But even then, there would be no buffer to keep the integrity of the course intact. My solution would be keeping part of the class run conventionally by a teacher, with another portion, perhaps 50% of the grade, to be peer run. This would allow for any obstruction of grades by students to be offset by an authority figure. Ultimately, peer grading seems like a great idea in theory, but the abundance of things that can go wrong offsets the positive potential for me.
ReplyDeleteI understand the point you are trying to make about authority but I think one of the goals of peer to peer grading is that the students teaching the lesson and grading the blogs would gain the authority they need by teaching the class. Maybe they would be inclined to do the extra research in the subject, gaining a bigger and broader knowledge than the rest of the class. The students teaching the class would also have to be open to every different viewpoint and learn to to understand and interpret other peoples ideas with a critical eye rather than simply agreeing or disagreeing.
ReplyDeleteInteresting point about the chances of crowdsourcing working in larger classes. There are some writing classes, notably the intro Rhetoric classes, that hold a large number of students but that I could see as a class with peer revisions and such. Overall, I think the approach might be even better in a large class. If you didn't have to grade the same people every class the idea that people would be vindictive is eliminated. The problem, though, as you pointed out, seems to be mainly logistical. It's got to be difficult enough to keep up with 20 or so people and their interactions. Crowdsourcing in a larger group seems to have the potential for a loss of control over the situation. This is just one point that brings up a common problem: Crowdsourcing sounds like it could have great effects, but we have a hard time seeing it working for our classes practically.
ReplyDeleteI think you're really on to something with that idea though, Jenna. The grading rotation a large class requires would make it really difficult for the graders to be biased. If they can find a solution for the potential loss of control in larger classes, like having the TA (because if the class is big enough I'm sure they will have one) monitor the overall situation, I think crowdsourcing could work really well in a large class setting. Since practicality is an issue, we need to look for solutions within the existing elements of the class.
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