peer review recap part 3

After reading my own previous peer review recaps and some of my colleagues, I found that our entries mostly say the same sorts of things: I found the process to be sort of helpful; there were some glitches editing on line (Jeff, Hannah, and Mike all seem to be on board with me here). However, since this blog assignment asks us to look more critically at the process as a whole, I logged back in to Wetpaint and my first Google docs group to look at what comments were actually made on not only my work, but others as well. I found that the peer editing process is really good for two things:

1. An ego boost. There are a lot of "great paper!" or "good start!" 's flying around out there. Which, is nice. I had 4 different people tell me my Style paper was some variation on "good". It was nice to see, but apparently not correct, as after receiving my graded paper back the professor, my grade did not reflect the sorts of overwhelmingly nice comments I received in the peer review process. I can't fault people for doing this though; they probably do think it's a great start. I think this significant drawback to the process could be eliminated if Professor Krause gave us some sort of rubric to work with that we could base our judgments off of while we peer review. I'm thinking the most base form of rubric, some thing like "to score top points on this paper, you need to make clear connections to both texts discussed in class. Mulitple examples will be given and explained fully.... yada yada details only krause could give." That way, we could meaningfully judge our peers work.

2. Grammar. Since good content is relatively subjective given that we don't know what its expected outside of our own expectations for "good", a majority of the feedback given is gramatical. Commas, excess words, and capitalization are caught in abundance. Which, is of course, useful, espically since these things often slip past the author because they're familar enough with the work to know what should be there.

Peer reviewtake three hasn't really been much different from this. As much as I really like the idea of peer review, in retrospect I think we need more information and guideance to make it a truely meaningful process.