Cathy Davidson "had no idea when [she] posted this it would be such a popular topic." What she is referring to here is her blog post written about how she goes about crowdsourcing grading in her classroom. Davidson, a professor teaching a class called "Your Brain on the Internet," feels students should have to participate in the evaluation process of their peers. She ultimately wants to teach her students "responsibility, credibility, judgment, honesty, and how to offer good criticism to one's peers--and, in turn, how to receive it."
Many people responded to this idea of handing over grading to the students, and they responded in a variety of ways. She even received a comment that said she is
“a wacko holding forth on a soapbox. If Ms. Davidson just wants to yammer and lead discussions, she should resign her position and head for a park or subway platform, and pass a hat for donations.”
Why does the idea of handing over grading power to the group of people working for a grade cause such controversy? In Davidson's own words, she answers this question by saying, "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."
The Internet in itself can only work well to promote democracy if we, as members of the online community, participate in discourse and in the evaluation, civil critique, and debate of ideas. With her grading style, Davidson is attempting to help her students do this in an offline context.
One of the responders to her post had this to say:
"I like that grades represent a normalized scale of relative accomplishment."
In a crowdsourced grading environment, grades are still represented in this manner if the professor gives a basic structure to the grading system. Simply telling students to grade each other without any sort of bench mark for each grade is not effective.
Professors should give basic structure to the grading system and then let students evaluate each other based on those standards.
Do you think this type of evaluation would work in a professional environment? What if managers didn't ultimately evaluate performance and coworkers in the same level of power evaluated each other?
Personally I think this type of evaluation in a work environment like a corporation would fail. There would be too many competing ideas and people would try and change other's work or take over the entire process. Without higher-ups making the final decisions on whether or not an employees work is up to the company's standards and represents it the same way uniformly, I don't believe everyone could work together effectively even if they split up the work. I think naturally it would start peer to peer but end up back as a hierarchy.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure this type of evaluation would would work in a work environment. Peer to peer evaluation could be helpful, but it shouldn't be the deciding factor. In a business or corporation there should be some sort of structure in order to know who has the final say in a decision. Otherwise, you may have multiple people making different decisions on the same thing.
ReplyDeleteI shudder to think of my peers in junior high and high school grading my work, because I wasn't the most popular student. I think students are too entrenched in social issues and pressure to objectively grade their peers. This system could easily lead to more effective bullying, because then it would actually impact that student's future. Sounds like a way to take pressure off of the teacher grading papers. I think it would be better to have input, in paragraph form that the teacher then processes into a grade, but even that could lead to the disadvantages I previously mentioned. I am feverishly opposed to this idea.
ReplyDelete