How Tool Support and Peer Scoring Improved Our Students' Attitudes Toward Peer Reviews

We wanted to introduce peer reviews for the final report in a course on Software Testing. The students had however experienced issues with peer reviews in a previous course which made this a challenge. To get a better understanding of the situation, we distributed a pre-questionnaire to the students. 48 of the 83 students provided their expectations on peer reviews. To deal with some of the perceived issues, we developed a peer review tool where we introduce anonymity, grading of reviews, teacher interventions, as well as let students score and comment on the reviews they receive. In total, 67 reports were submitted by 83 students and 325 reviews were completed. The post-questionnaire was answered by 48 students (not necessarily the same respondents as for the pre-questionnaire as both were collected anonymously). While 27 of the students expected incorrect feedback only 13 students agreed to have got incorrect feedback in the post-questionnaire. The students reported that they found the feedback from their peers more valuable (+15%) than expected, and 88% of the students reported that they learned from doing peer reviews. Overall, we find that the students' attitudes towards peer reviews have improved