As I tend to be pretty conscious of my grades, "aw, heck naw" was my knee-jerk reaction to the idea of crowdsourcing grades. I did my best, especially after reading Davidson's reply to her critics, to take her word at face value and not to scowl.
I must say, I think Davidson's argument has value. She has students be more responsible through the whole process of taking the course and makes them responsible to one another for the quality of their work. From this angle, I think crowdsourcing grading sounds like a relatively great way to do it.
As a student, though, I don't think I could help but object to crowdsourcing. I don't think I would choose a class if it said this would be going on in its description, and I think the idea of my peers grading my papers and other assignments would make me...angry.
If Dr. Davis gives me a really awful grade on a paper, I'm not going to be happy, but I wouldn't question that she's the authority on the subject. Like with group projects, though, if a peer seemed to have not done a satisfactory job and caused me to have a poor grade, I'd be angry. This class, with these specific people, after reading your blogs and interacting with you in class, I MIGHT be willing to participate in this with.
I think Davidson's argument presents a sort of utopian idea of what classes are like. All the students are suddenly motivated to work hard when they have the opportunity to run the show (at least a little). My fear is that this wouldn't be as much of a motivation for other students as it would be for me and that those students who work hard would be subjected to the group project nightmare - all semester.
I think this was everyone's reaction. I'm going to try and quote what someone said in our internship class today. "It's like when I talk people about group projects, we are always the one who say they do all the work. All these bums seem to come out of the woodwork when there are group projects." Although, I think that crowd source grading would distribute the work equally.
ReplyDeleteI get what you mean. I haven't had the best experiences with groups either, but I didn't imagine crowdsourced grading as a group project. I pictured it as a process mediated by the instructor at every step – kind of like quality control in a factory – so that the review process could help you get different opinions on how to improve, and grading would still be consistent. I wonder if Davidson's going to write a blog post to tell us how crowdsourcing grading went....
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