Guidelines for peer review of assignments:

How to do peer review well:

• Give thoughtful, constructive and considerate comments.
• Be specific and concise.
• Use the rubric to for ideas about criteria to evaluate and comment on
• Try to learn something new and, if you succeed, point that out.
• If you can’t find anything to praise or that you found helpful, then at least offer some suggestions in a kind way.

How you will be marked:

• It’s binary. Each peer review will be deemed “good” or “needs more”.

• Hallmarks of “needs more” feedback:

  • Your review is so generic that it’s hard to determine which assignment you’re reviewing.
  • Your review is mean.
  • You can’t find anything to praise/learn and yet you don’t offer any suggestions either.

• Each review you do will get you 1 point if “good” and 0 points if “needs more”. Those will be totalled over all assignments to form your peer review mark.

Additional resources:

Peer reviewing and critiquing others’ work is a useful skill to develop during your graduate studies. Although these links deal mainly with the peer review of academic papers, most of the key points are applicable to our peer review process.

• Reviewing academic papers by Jeff Leek

• Edicts for peer reviewing (Ebb & Flow blog)

• Faculty of 1000 Research: tips for peer reviewing

• The section entitled “How to perform the actual code review”