Grading 600+ Students: A Case Study on Peer and Self Grading

Abstract

Grading large classes has become a challenging and expensive task for many universities. The Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), located in the Netherlands, has observed a large increase in student numbers over the past few years. Given the large growth of the student population, grading all the submissions results in high costs. We made use of self and peer grading in the 2018-2019 edition of our software testing course. Students worked in teams of two, and self and peer graded three assignments in our course. We ended up with 906 self and peer graded submissions, which we compared to 248 submissions that were graded by our TAs. In this paper, we report on the differences we observed between self, peer, and TA grading. Our findings show that: (i) self grades tend to be 8-10% higher than peer grades on average, (ii) peer grades seem to be a good approximator of TA grades; in cases where self and peer grade differ significantly, the TA grade seems to lie in between, and (iii) the gender and the nationality of the student do not seem to affect self and peer grading.