Understand and Improve Your Review Grade

This article covers

Viewing Your Grades

Understanding Your Accuracy and Helpfulness Grades

Improving Your Review Grade

The Knowledge Base has more information about grades and reviewing in Peerceptiv.

Note: None of the data represented in the examples and screenshots come from real students. All of the student and course information has been created in order to illustrate how to understand and improve your review grade.

Viewing Your Grades

When you first view your grades in Peerceptiv, you will see a table with the review grade, writing grade, and task grade. The top row shows these grades out of 100. The second row shows the weighted grade, calculated according to the percentages set by your instructor. The bottom, overall, grade is the weighted total out of 100 points. Note that, as in the case below, the overall grade may be rounded to the nearest whole number.

Click on either double arrow icon to see the grade breakdown. This chart breaks the review grade into two components: accuracy and helpfulness. The task grade is divided into the number of tasks required, so there could be as few as one (review only) or as many as three (review, feedback, self-evaluation, team evaluation), depending on how your instructor set up the assignment. This detailed chart also includes any late penalties you may have received for submitting late work.

Understanding Your Accuracy and Helpfulness Grades

To understand your accuracy and helpfulness grades, click on either question mark to see more information.

At the top of the screen, you can see your helpfulness. There are up to five stars listed per review, based on how helpful the document author considered your review to be. If, as in this case, one or more of the document authors did not complete their feedback, your helpfulness is the average of the reviews which were given feedback. You can always click on the View Reviews by You and Others buttons to see how your peers reviewed the same document.

At the bottom of the screen is the information about how your accuracy grade is calculated. There is one graph for each rating in the rubric. The paragraph above the graphs explains that the documents you reviewed are listed in the same order for all prompts.

The rating is listed in the top left corner. This student's rating line (red) has the same shape as the average rating line (blue), so this student has a good accuracy score. Peerceptiv gives higher accuracy scores to students who rank the documents in the same way as the other reviewers and then looks at the distance from the mean. This means that even if you give a document a score of 9 while others give it a 10, as long as you agree that this document is the best in this area of the ones that you read, your accuracy score will be higher. Overall, you want to rate like your instructor would rate - particularly because your instructor may be reviewing documents alongside the student reviewers.

Accuracy Score Examples

Here are three sets of accuracy graphs to help you see the difference between above average accuracy, average accuracy, and below average accuracy in Peerceptiv. Remember that the accuracy score is looking at the order in which you rank the documents compared to the other reviewers and the distance your ratings are from the mean. In general, you want your ratings to have the same shape as the line for the mean ratings.

This student had an above average accuracy score. Although they did not always give the same rating as the mean rating, they generally ranked the documents in the same order as the other reviewers did. In other words, for this reviewer, Submission #1 generally got the highest ratings, Submission #2 the lowest ratings, and Submission #3 ratings between the two. Additionally, this reviewer gave ratings very similar to the mean ratings, with only a few ratings (Introduction for Submission #2 and Materials Description for #2) being more than 1 point from the mean.

This student had an average accuracy score for the assignment, scoring 1 point above the grade curve mean of 85%. In general, this reviewer's line has a similar shape to the mean line. The one big exception is the 'Materials and Methods' prompt in the lower left. The highlighting shows that this student rated Submission #3 as being the best (rating it with a 7/7) while the mean ranking was that it was only slightly better than the Materials and Methods section in Submission #1. Here, the lines do not at all resemble each other by Submission #3 for this prompt. While the lines for the other prompts do have a similar shape, this reviewer gave ratings significantly different from the mean (more than 1 point different) for four of the prompts, all marked with arrows.

The last example shows a student with below average accuracy, at 76%. This student has several places where their rank ordering does not match the mean order. The four sets of ratings highlighted in yellow show places where this reviewer felt the document was much better or worse than other documents reviewed but the mean ratings have a different order. Additionally, there are five prompts where this reviewer gave a rating that was at least two points different than the mean rating. Taken together, the highlighted ratings and ratings marked by the arrows show that this student gave very different ratings than the others who reviewed those same documents.

Improving Your Review Grades

Improve your helpfulness scores by providing more specific and constructive comments.

• Read the feedback you received for your peers' suggestions about what would have made your comments more helpful.
• Read some of the other reviewers' comments on the same documents to see the comments your peers made.
• Give yourself more time to complete the reviewing task.
• Read the commenting prompt carefully and respond to what is being asked.
• Be as specific and constructive as possible in your comments.

Improve your accuracy scores by looking at your accuracy graphs from your most recent Peerceptiv individual assignment. Do most of your graphs resemble those of the Conclusion and Key Eras from the graphs above? If so, your accuracy is generally good. Do most of your graphs resemble those of the Introduction and Body in the graphs above? If so, your accuracy is low. In both cases, there are steps you can take to improve your accuracy.

1. Give yourself sufficient time to review the documents thoughtfully. The necessary amount of time will vary depending on the length of the assignment, the number of rating prompts, and the number of required reviews. Students who procrastinate on the reviewing task often end up choosing ratings at random and leaving basic comments that are not helpful, affecting their accuracy and helpfulness grades.
2. Read the rubric carefully and think about each rating prompt. Do you understand what each dimension is assessing? Do you recognize the difference between the rating levels? If possible, look at the rubric before you submit your document and use it to inform your own submission. If you have questions about the rubric or rating prompts, please ask your instructor before submitting your first review.
3. Try to rate like your instructor. Your instructor is objectively assigning the rating which most closely describes that aspect of the document. Instructors generally do not try to give all students A’s or F’s. Approach reviewing like your instructor to try to rate the document as objectively as possible, based on the rating descriptors at each level.
4. Notice if you tend to rate high or low. Compare your ratings to the average ratings for multiple dimensions and/or across multiple assignments. Do you consistently tend to rate higher or lower than the average? If so, go back to the rubric and descriptions and try to use those to more carefully inform your ratings. 

Final Notes on Accuracy

If you have a zero (0) accuracy grade, it is because you gave the same rating to all dimensions of all documents that you were reviewing. This is a trigger to the algorithms behind Peerceptiv that you were not reviewing the documents carefully and instead just assigning a number to all of the dimensions without thought. If you receive a 0 accuracy grade and you do not think it is correct, please contact your instructor and Peerceptiv at [e-mail] for further analysis.

The research behind Peerceptiv has shown that students who go through the assignment process carefully and thoughtfully improve in their writing (or document content) skills and their critical thinking. The reviewing process is designed to help you think about the content of your course and the delivery (writing, speaking, project) of that content in a more constructively critical way. Taking steps to improve your accuracy grade will help you think more critically, improve the way you express your knowledge of the class material, and improve your Peerceptiv assignment review grade.

If you have questions about your accuracy or other aspects of a Peerceptiv assignment, you can always reach out to [e-mail].