Some limits in peer assessment

Abstract

Nowadays, the known as ‘peer assessment’ is one of the pillars of formative assessment in the different levels of the educational system buts, especially, in the University level. Last years, it has been considered in order to enhance students' meaningful learning, considering it as an element of social learning from the lessons learned by other classmates, and the ability to assess their quality, compared with the level of knowledge that each student has about the subject/course evaluated, and using common evaluation criteria.

Relating to this, the experience presented in this paper has been developed with two groups of students. It allows to determine how many peer assessments is prudent to ask course students in order to make a serious and reliable activity, and not as a required and mandatory exercise that has to be carried out by students simply to pass the course; in this last case, the activity could become extremely trivial and banal. Statistical analysis of the results indicates that three-peer assessments per student appraised are a good lot. In addition, on the other hand, more than thirty-peer assessments do not provide learning nor serious activities.