Peer Review Assignments Scott D.

Wilson Department of Philosophy Wright State University 3640 Colonel Glen Highway Dayton, OH 45435 scott.wilson@wright.edu (937) 775-3354

Peer Review Assignments 1. Introduction What should our students take away from one of our classes? I used to think that the answer to this question was obvious: if a student were enrolled in an ethics class, for example, she should be familiar with the major theories of ethics, know which philosophers advanced these theories, and be able to cite and asses some reasons both for and against each theory. When I first started teaching, I was shocked to learn how hard it is to get students to be able to do this. Many students confused one philosopher with another, confused one theory with another, and could not provide an original criticism of any theory at all. I soon realized what the problem wasmy approach to teaching made students think that philosophy is really about memorizing and regurgitating certain facts, something that very few students were motivated to do well. I had intended all along for students to gain much more than this from my classes, and so I realized that my approach was a failure. What I really wanted my students to get from my class was the ability to think critically and to communicate clearly and effectively. Whether they knew that it was Mill and not Bentham who was a qualified rather than an unqualified hedonist was really inconsequential in the end, especially considering the fact that very few of my students go on to graduate school in philosophy. I decided that the best way to improve their critical thinking and communication skills was to have them writeto write quite a lot, actually. So rather than evaluating my students primarily through tests, quizzes, and the occasional writing assignment, I began to make the major portion of their grade depend on a larger argumentative essay. This assignment has a number of steps, including short, purely expository pieces, short analyses of arguments, and a thesis assignment in which the students develop a thesis that they then into a paper. The heart of this

assignment was, of course, the final paper. I discovered, however, that even with all of these shorter assignments, the essays I eventually received were generally of very low quality. I knew that I had to do something to help my students improve their writing. So I took a cue from some professors in English departments, and began requiring my students to write a rough draft and then have a peer review assignment to turn that rough draft into a final copy. In what follows I will discuss the different kinds of peer review assignments I use, highlight both the rationale and benefits of these kinds of assignments, and finally go over some of the drawbacks of these assignments. I conclude that a peer review assignment is a useful pedagogical tool because it allows students to improve their writing and critical thinking skills. 2. The Mechanics of Peer Review Assignments I now use two different kinds of peer review assignments, depending on the level of the course I am teaching. The first is an in-class assignment designed primarily for my lower division courses. The other is a take home assignment used for my upper division courses. Lets discuss each in turn. For my lower division courses, I use what Stanley Werne refers to as rough draft sessions.1 Around one week before the final draft is due, I require my students to bring four copies of their completed rough drafts to class with them. I then break them into groups of three; each student gives the other two students in her group a copy of her paper, I receive the third copy, and the student retains one for herself. I then distribute a handout with a list of questions and space for the students to respond to those questions on the sheet (see Appendix A). Each group begins by reading one of the three papers for around five to ten minutes.2 They then fill out their answers to the questions for another 10 minutes. Finally, the group discusses this paper with the author. They then turn their attention to the other two papers in the same manner.3

The questions I have asked the students to answer are designed to help the students better understand and appreciate the nature of argumentative writing. If another professor were to focus his attention on some other skill, the questions should of course differ from those I ask. However, many philosophy professors require their students to write argumentative essays, and so the questions I ask should be of interest to many of them. The questions on this sheet can be divided into three different kinds. The first kind of question requires students to look at the mechanics of the paper they are reviewing, such as the spelling, grammar, formatting, and structure of the paper. I ask the students to point out the errors they find in the text as the read; however, since it is not possible for the students (or their professors, for that matter) to catch all mistakes of this kind, I include a question on the answer sheet for the students to indicate whether they think these sorts of problems are widespread, sporadic, or non-existent. The second kind of question requires students to focus on the argumentation of the paper. In particular, I ask the students to see whether they can determine (a) what issue is being discussed in the paper; (b) whether there is a proper thesis in the paper (more on this below); (c) whether the author provides any reason(s) in support of the thesis; and (d) whether these reasons are convincing. I have been amazed at how many papers have been improved by my asking questions of type (a). Many students write philosophy papers so poorly that it is often hard to determine what issue they are discussing in the paper.4 When the students begin to discuss a paper in their groups, the author will have to admit that other people cannot determine what issue he has discussed. This forces the students to see their writing from the perspective of another, which is perhaps the greatest benefit of this kind of assignment (more on this in the next section).

The main problem I used to face when grading papers, however, was that the vast majority did not have a proper thesis. A proper thesis is a short statement describing the exact nature of the claim that will be defended in the paper along with a brief description of the main reason(s) supporting that claim. So, for example, the following do not count as proper theses: i.) I will discuss issue x ii.) I will discuss the reasons both for and against issue x, and will conclude which side is correct. iii.) I will argue that position y is the correct answer to issue x. Almost all of the papers I received that had any thesis at all had a thesis statement that resembled something like (i) (iii). None of the students coming into a peer review session believed that their paper lacked a proper thesis; however, when no one in their group could identify the thesis of their paper, the students were once again forced to see their paper through the eyes of another. The students begin to see the importance of clear and direct language, for they did not want to appear to have nothing to say in front of their peers. Similar points apply concerning the reasons used to support the thesis. Very often the reasons students give in support of their thesis are that they think that it is true, or it is something they have always believed, or it is something which is maintained by their church or family or friends or culture. Students are not good at recognizing the impotence of these reasons when they use them to support their own positions; however, they are remarkably good at seeing this when others do. Once again, by seeing these mistakes in the papers of their peers, students gain the ability to see these mistakes in their own papers, and thus learn how to reason better. The final kind of question I ask is a sort of catch all question. Before I included this kind of question, students would complain that answering the questions I had asked did not allow them

to give a true representation of their overall impression of the paper; some thought they were being overly critical, while others thought that they were being overly generous. They blamed this on the specific questions I asked, claiming that they did not give them enough to say. So I once again followed the suggestion of Werne and included summary questions, such as, What is the best thing about this paper? and What does the author need to do in order to most improve the paper? Students responded to these questions very positively, especially the question concerning what was best about the paper. It is important for professors of philosophy to note that many of our students see our discipline as overly critical and negative; including this kind of question allows them to see that we adhere to the values of collegiality, and that they should too. For my upper division course, I use a slightly different approach. Rather than having the students read the rough drafts in class, I require the students to exchange rough drafts in small groups and then give them around one week to read over and comment upon the drafts they receive. I ask the students to write out their answers to a list of questions, and have their answers ready to discuss on a given day. The class meets on that day, and the students break into discussion groups of three, giving the group twenty minutes for each paper. The questions I ask here are similar to those I ask in the rough draft sessions, but differ in two respects (see Appendix B). First, I ask the students to go into more detail than they would in an in-class session. In particular, I want to see that the students have spent a good amount of time thinking about the overall structure and argument of the paper they are reading. I stress to the students that being able to read and comprehend the arguments of other people is a necessary first step to contributing their own ideas to the debate, thus motivating them to take this part of the assignment seriously. Second, I also include questions that require the students to evaluate the exposition of the views being discussed in the paper they are editing. In my lower division courses, most of the exposition

contained in the papers comes directly from our readings and class discussions. However, by the time students are enrolled in upper division courses, I require that they discuss passages that we did not exhaustively discuss in class, so that I can help them to develop their ability to accurately and concisely explain the ideas of another. I used to assign the take home assignment to all of my classes. However, this turned out to be too much to require for my lower division students. Many of them seemed overwhelmed by the assignment, and subsequently did nothing but provide ridiculously short answers for each question. Furthermore, the lower division students need to have the professor in the room with them to help settle disagreement when they arise in the rough draft sessions. For example, one group was trying to convince a student to give up his perfectly good thesis for one that was overly ambitious. Had I not been in class to help the group to understand why the one thesis was better than the other the student in question would have written a much weaker paper. I then tried requiring my upper division students to do the in-class rough draft sessions as well. However, this turned out to be a mistake also. The upper division students have greater abilities than do the lower division students; furthermore, they often are not motivated to learn unless they are being challenged. The result of these attitudes was that the in-class rough draft work sessions were not taken seriously by my upper division students. They seemed to see these sessions as days off and so got a good amount of gossiping in, but very little editing.5 So I have decided that the two kinds of peer review assignments I have described here are best used for different kinds of classes. The in-class rough draft sessions work best for lower division courses, especially if the students in the course need a lot of help in their editing; the longer, take home, assignment is best used for upper division students, especially if those students respond well to challenges.

3. Rationale and Benefits of a Peer Review Assignment In this section I will highlight some of the advantages of using either form of peer review assignment described above. The first reason to implement a peer review assignment derives from the general usefulness of writing rough drafts coupled with the pragmatic problem of our trying to read and comment on all of these drafts. Lets begin with the general usefulness of writing rough drafts. Before I began requiring students to write rough drafts, the vast majority of papers turned in to me lacked a proper thesis (see above section). This happened even after requiring students to complete a thesis assignment. In this assignment, students had to think about an issue, decide what side they would defend, and cite some reasons for their stance. Typically, what I received for this assignment were proper theses. I was baffledhow could students go from having a proper thesis to lacking one? We can begin to understand the answer to this question by reflecting on one of my favorite quotations from Mark Twain: The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.6 In other words, students would write the thesis assignment without really giving much thought to how the thesis will be defended in a larger paper.7 When it came time to actually write their paper, they had no idea how the thesis would be defended. In fact, I tend to think that students sit down to write their papers with no idea at all what they want to say. When the paper is long enough, they stop, run a spell check (sometimes), and turn it in. So I was receiving nothing but first drafts of papers, drafts in which the students are just beginning to see what position they take on an issue and the reasons for holding that position. This was apparent from the fact that the conclusions of their papers tended to have much better statements of their theses than did their introductionsby the time they finished their papers, they knew what they wanted to say. Simply

telling the students to write a rough draft and then rewrite it was not working. If they were not forced to do this, they would not. My first impulse was to have the students write rough drafts and turn these in to me so I could help them to improve their papers. Reality soon made this option untenable. I simply have too many students, and have already included a number of shorter writing assignments in each of my classes. The amount of grading and editing I was doing was enough to make a good professor go bad. It was at this point that the practice of peer review assignments, common in so many English departments but hardly heard of in many Philosophy departments, began to sound more and more attractive to me. After my first peer review assignment I knew that I was on to something, for every paper in that first batch I received after this assignment contained a proper thesis. This result was unthinkable to me before the assignmentI went from having few proper theses to having every paper in the class containing one. There was also a dramatic improvement in spelling, grammar, and formatting requirements. Much of the tedious editing I was forced to do was being taken care of by my students. These reasons were enough to convince me to give it another try. The second reason to implement a peer review assignment is that it requires students to engage in active, rather than merely passive, learning. Before the peer review assignment, I would go through the rough drafts, marking the most egregious grammatical, spelling, and structural mistakes, and suggest ways for them to improve their argumentation skills. There was simply no way for me to catch all of their mistakes and problems, for there were simply too many mistakes and problems and, as I have already noted, I had too many students. I would tell my students that the passages I marked were merely representative of the problems in their papers, and that they should not confine themselves to changing only those passages I had marked. I wanted them to go

through their own papers to see if they could find these mistakes themselves, and then go on to determine ways to correct them. However, what I received after doing this were, almost to a paper, papers that were either identical to the original paper, or else ones that had been modified to change only those passages I had marked. Furthermore, I noticed that the students who made certain grammatical, spelling, or structural mistakes were not improving their writing over time. A student who did not use complete sentences on one assignment would simply get rid of the offending sentence for that paper; in the next assignment, she would commit the exact same mistake. However, once I started the peer review assignment, I noticed a steady improvement on spelling, grammar, and structure for many of my students. This change was a lasting changeI noticed that students who took several courses from me were beginning to write better in general. The best way to explain this change can be seen by considering a students response to a questionnaire I pass out asking my students what they think of the peer review assignment. This response was so perfect, and reinforced my hopes in implementing this kind of assignment so much, that I asked the student his permission to write it here. He wrote, This was the hardest assignment Ive ever had in my life. Im not very good with grammar and spelling, and so I had to have a dictionary and a style guide with me the whole time. It took a really long time because I had to learn all of the rules before I could edit the paper. In other words, before I required the students to review their peers work, they would receive their marked rough drafts and either make no changes or simply change what I had marked, without learning for themselves why I had made the suggestions I did. This is a completely passive way to learn. Rather than engaging in an activity that requires the students to think about the rules of proper writing, I was giving them what they thought was a list of needed changes. They would change things if they had time, or do nothing if they ran out of time. Many did not reflect on their writing one bit, however. By forcing

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them to be responsible for editing the work of another, however, I forced them to become active participants in the process of writing. If they were going to criticize their classmates for their writing, they felt that they needed to know what they were talking about. One of the most rewarding experiences I have had in this kind of assignment was helping a group of students settle a debate concerning the best way to phrase a certain idea. Each person in the group had their own favorite way of expressing it, and each was passionate about the superiority of their way of putting things. Giving the rather lethargic reaction many professors claim they receive in their classrooms, I was pleased to have to ask this group to settle down a bit. These anecdotes help me to see the truth in the claim that the students will retain better what they learn through active learning than what they learn through passive learning. A third and related reason to use a peer review assignment is that these assignments force students to engage in collaborative work, which is by now known to have positive effects on student learning.8 One such benefit was easy to discern right away. My classes tend to have a large spectrum of student ability: on one end of the spectrum are students who are not only prepared and eager to learn, but who are also talented writers. On the other end of the spectrum are the students who are not prepared for university classes. This mix is quite often a serious problem when deciding how to devise the level of my classes; however, for the peer review assignment, this mix is a blessing. Inevitably, the editing groups will contain students are varying abilities (I try to ensure this by making the groupings non-arbitrary). By having a strong student in each group, the weaker students will have their papers read and edited by someone who can give them good advice. Thus the weaker students can become better writers and reasoners. It may be objected that this supposed benefit is not unique to the peer review assignment. That is, when we grade our students rough drafts, we give our weaker students all that we can in

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order to help them improve their writing. So this supposed advantage is not an advantage to the peer review assignment but is instead merely an advantage for writing and revising rough drafts. There are two replies to this objection. First, as I have already noted, I have too many students to read and edit both rough and final drafts. So the peer review assignment helps for this reason. But more importantly, there is a difference between a student receiving feedback from her professor and a student receiving the same feedback from a peer. When I criticize a students paper, the student will simply accept what I say as true (or, more cynically, as what is required in order to get a good grade in my class). When another student criticizes the same paper, however, the students will enter into a dialogue. This is due to the fact that I have more power than my students, and so they defer to me and my judgments too readily and without a critical eye. When a peer criticizes them, they are able to see that there is more than one response to the criticism. They may agree with the reviewer, disagree with the reviewer, or demand that reviewer explain the criticisms in more detail. They thus begin to clarify their own positions, attempt to understand the positions of others, and to defend their own positions. In other words, the editing process requires them to do more of the sort of thing that I have already required them to donamely, to develop and defend arguments. These arguments concern how best to write a paper, and so provide an additional source of practice for this very difficult skill. So there is a reason to have students engage in a peer review assignment that does not apply equally to our reviewing our students rough drafts ourselves. These sorts of assignments force them to enter into a collaborative effort to reach a consensus about the merits of each others papers. A related point, and the fourth reason to use a peer review assignment, is that these assignments can be used to instill the value of taking responsibility for our own work in the students. I am sure that many professors have had an experience similar to this. You required

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your students to write a rough draft of their papers, which you edited and returned to your students. You receive for a final copy a paper that is riddled with grammar and spelling mistakes, and is so poorly organized that it is hard to follow. Accordingly, you giver the paper a very low grade; the student complains that none of the mistakes you have marked on the final draft were marked on the rough draft. The student thus blames you for receiving the bad grade. We have already seen how something like this can happen. When faced with a stack of rough drafts, it is simply not feasible to catch every mistake each student makes. Likewise, it is not prudent to spend hours correcting every mistake on a bad paper. The best strategy to use here is to mark one or two passages, and let the student know that the mistakes in these passages are only representative. There is no doubt that in a case like this, it is the student who is not taking responsibility for his own work. You can point this out to the student, but he will still feel as if it is you who has let him down. I am not claiming that students are justified in this response. Whether they are justified or not is not my concern here. What I wanted to do was to find some way to overcome this problem; I found that peer review sessions help. The reason they help is that the person who has edited their paper is their equal. A criticism from an equal is not something that students (or anyone, for that matter) are willing simply to accept without question. They are much more willing (indeed, they are often eager) to respond to these criticisms. I tell my students that this is exactly the attitude I expect of them. In order to help them in this regard, I tell them about the process of peer review that we as professors go through with every paper we write and try to get it published. By doing this, I let the student know that I am often in the same boat as theyI am writing papers I think are good papers. I receive feedback from my peers, and (sadly) have some papers rejected from some journals. When this happens, I am forced to ask myself some questions: Are these criticisms any

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good? Did the reviewer understand my thesis or argument? If not, whose fault is that? Once I have these criticisms, the onus is now on mehow should I respond? The difference between a student responding to a rough draft I have edited and responding to one that other students have edited is quite important. When I review their papers, students are liable to refrain from taking responsibility for what they write in the final draft since they believe that it is my job to make their papers better. When their peers review their work, the students rewrite their papers only after deciding for themselves which comments are good and which are bad. If the final draft they turn in is weak, then they only have themselves to blame for not responding well to the criticism provided by their peers. The final benefit of using a peer review assignment has already been touched upon in section 2 above. There, I justified using the questions I ask my students due to the fact that they force the students to see things from the perspective of another. Another way of putting this is that a peer review assignment helps students to improve their public writing, or writing intended to be read and understood by people other than the writer (or the writers professor). Once again, an anecdote from one of my classes will help to clarify this point. After the first time I had required a peer review assignment, a student approached me after class and said, in a rather conspiratorial tone, that she had a newly formed sense of appreciation for her professors. She explained that the papers she read were so poorly written that it took her much longer to read and edit them than she ever imagined. She was editing only two other papers and the assignment still took her hours. I asked her whether the students who wrote the papers admitted that they were bad, or if they defended them in their peer review session. She claimed that the authors had thought the papers were clear and well-argued. This caused her to doubt the quality of her own paper. She thought it

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was clear and well-argued as well; but, obvious to her now, feeling sure that your paper is clear and well-argued is not a failsafe way to ensure that it is in fact clear and well-argued. In other words, it is good for students to see bad writing. If all they ever read is the writing of professional philosophers or the great figures from the history of philosophy still read today they will not be able to see the kinds of mistakes that are common for undergraduate students. It is easier to spot the problems of others than it is to spot your own problems; my hope in giving these assignments is that once they spot these mistakes in their peers, they can begin to spot them in their own writing. Students need a model of bad writing, and their peers are more than ready to provide them with such a model. If these assignments can get a student to ask herself, Is my paper as bad as this? then I think the assignments will have served their purpose. These benefits are not negligible. My experience has been that students improve their writing and reasoning skills after completing these types of assignments. Since this is the goal of our courses, there is a strong prima facie reason to use them when we teach. 4. Some Drawbacks of Peer Review Assignments However, before we can be sure that these assignments are all-thingsconsidered worthwhile, we must address some of the problems associated with them. I will address two kinds of problems here. I conclude that neither kind of problem undermines the benefits of these assignments, and that they are, therefore a useful pedagogical tool for us to use. The first kind of problem is pragmatic. I have always had, and still do have, some issues concerning the grading of a peer review assignment. There are two problems here. The first is determining how to assess a students performance on the peer review assignment. The second is in determining the weighting of the peer review assignment for the overall course grade.

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Should I grade students on how well they have edited their peers work? This sounds like the logical thing to do. In other words, since the assignment is to read and edit the work of their peers, my job in assessing this assignment is judge how well they have done in performing this task. However, things are not so simple. For, first, doing this turns out to create more work than merely editing the rough drafts myself. Each paper will generate two sets of comments, thus giving me not only the original paper to grade, but also the two sets of comments for each paper. Trying to determine how many mistakes were missed by the students requires me to read and edit the paper myself, and then compare this to the work done by the students. Moreover, students who are not particularly good at the mechanics of writing a paper are going to be punished twice for this: once when I grade their papers, and then again when I grade the reviews they wrote. One way around this problem is to grade the reviews largely on the basis of the amount of effort put into them. Judging the amount of effort that went into the assignment is tricky, but not impossible. But this brings me to the second pragmatic problem, namely, that of determining how much weight this assignment should have in the overall course grade. I found that if these assignments were given very little weight, the students did not put in much effort. The benefits of these assignments arise only if the students put in a good amount of effort for them. By making the assignment have too little weight, many of the benefits I highlighted above simply do not surface. However, once I started grading these assignments on the basis of effort, it becomes awkward to give them too much weight. In other words, I do not want a very large portion of a students grade to depend on simply the amount of effort put into the assignment. It is too easy for students to get inflated grades this way, and I am strongly committed to bucking the grade-inflating trend at American universities today.

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These pragmatic problems operate in tandem. In order to solve the first problem, I created the second. My solution is to find the middle road. I must admit that I am still in the process of determining just where this road lies. It is best, I think, to lean as close as possible to grading these assignments largely on effort. If a student does not put in the effort required to improve his writing, then the responsibility lies with him: I have provided the means necessary to improve their writing, and if students refuse to take that assignment seriously, they have no one but themselves to blame. One way of addressing these problems is openly with your students. Discuss with them what you hope a peer review assignment will do for them, and let them know that the onus is on them. If they want to improve their writing, they should take the assignment seriously. If they do not, they will be the people who have to live with the results. The second kind of problem is pedagogical. I was very reluctant to utilize these sorts of assignment at first, mostly because I was unsure of the students abilities to edit the work of their peers. My thought was this: if the students cannot write strong papers themselves, how are they supposed to improve the writing of their peers? Will it not be a case of the blind leading the blind? This concern, however, is misguided. The main benefit a student receives from such an assignment is not that his peers will have provided him with solid and well-informed criticisms. Rather, the main benefit a student receives from these assignments is the ability to see their own work in a new perspective.9 Furthermore, the students who would learn the most from the comments a professor gives to their rough drafts tend to be the same students who put in the most amount of work in the peer review assignment. These are the conscientious students, the students who actually followed my instructions of not limiting themselves to changing only those passages I had marked. My comments helped these students because they are already predisposed to do the work necessary to improve their writing. Since these are the students who are predisposed to put

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in the required work, they are the same students who spend a lot of time and effort on the peer review assignment. This is relevant because the most important benefit one gets from the peer review assignment is not to be found in the criticisms given by their peers, but is to be found instead in the process of reviewing anothers work. There is a kind of harmony, or justice in this. The students who do not put in the work to give good comments are not getting something for nothing, for the most important benefits depend on the amount of effort put into the assignment. These students will receive the comments on their work and will then do what they have done all alongnamely, not very much in the way of revision. The students who do put in a lot of work, even if they receive terrible or misguided comments, still receive the greatest benefits. 5. Conclusion It is important for us to remember that most students in our classes will not go on to graduate school in philosophy. We do these students a great disservice if continue to pretend that they all are going to do so. What we can do for these students is to teach them to do what we do bestto reason clearly, succinctly, and well. By including an argumentative essay as the centerpiece of our classes, we are well on our way to doing this. However, we must do more than this, for we must not only require students to write these essays, we must also teach them how to improve their writing once they have begun. Peer review assignments are useful pedagogical tools that help us to achieve this end. My experience has been that their benefits are numerous and significant, while the drawbacks are few and able to be circumvented.

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Appendix A: In-Class Peer Review Assignment

Paper Title: Authors Name: Reviewers Name: ___________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________

1.) First, look over the mechanics of the paper, including (a) MLA formatting; (b) spelling; (c) grammar; (d) punctuation; (e) writing style. Indicate problems of this nature in the body of the text. Does the paper contain a lot of these problems, or only a few? 2.) Second, determine the Topic of the paper and the Thesis of the paper. The topic can usually be best expressed in the form of a question, while the thesis is an answer to that question. 2a.) What is the topic of the paper? 2b.) Does the paper have a proper thesis (that is, does it have a clear and direct statement of the exact nature of the conclusion(s) that will be reached in the paper)? If so, underline the thesis in the body of the text, and write the word thesis next to it. If you cannot find such a statement, then what would you say is the thesis of the paper? [Write your answer below]. If there is no thesis that you can identify, write No thesis.

2c.) If there is a thesis (either a proper thesis or one that needs work) do you think that the thesis is both interesting and modest? What can the author do to improve the thesis?

3.) Try to determine the nature of the reason(s) that the author uses in order to support the thesis. 3a.) Does the author provide reasons in order to support the thesis? Yes or No 3b.) Try to briefly summarize those reasons in a sentence or two below:

3c.) Do you find these reasons convincing, or do they need work? Explain below.

4.) What is the best thing about this paper?

5.) How can the author most improve the paper?

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Appendix B: Take-Home Peer Review Assignment10

As soon as you receive your two drafts, write Reviewed by (your name) on the front page of the paper. For each of the drafts you receive, write hand-written notes on the draft itself. These notes should alert the writer of the places in which you believe that: (a) there is a spelling, punctuation, or grammatical mistake (b) the writing is unclear (c) the writing is especially awkward (d) there are formatting problems with the paper (e) there are structural problems with the paper After you have read the paper and attempted to understand its thesis and the argument(s) for the thesis, type out responses to the following questions and staple it to the draft: 1.) Is the philosophical issue well-defined in the paper? What is the issue? Is it a philosophical issue or is it some other kind of issue (i.e. psychological, sociological)? If it is not philosophical, how can the author make it more philosophical? 2.) Can you identify the thesis statement of the paper? If so, state it. Does it appear in the introduction of the paper? If you cannot identify a clear thesis statement, identify what you think it might be. 3.) After reading the introduction, do you have a good idea of what the paper will contain? Explain. 4.) Do you think that this essay provides any original and interesting insights to the problem(s) it discusses, or does it merely bring up points discussed in class? Is the thesis controversial and exciting, or is it obvious and boring (or somewhere in between)? 5.) Does the author explain difficult concepts and ideas by use of examples? If so, are they effective? If not, do you think it would help if she did? Be specific and give examples where this will help. 6.) Does the author explain the arguments and ideas of the people she discusses in a clear and accurate manner? If not, give examples where you believe that she has misrepresented the positions she discusses. 7.) Does the author provide support for her arguments by using examples and analogies? If so, do they help? If not, do you think that some might help? Be specific and give examples where this will help. 8.) Do you think that the author has provided good support for her thesis? If not, explain why you think that she has not. How can she improve the support of her thesis? 9.) Does the author respond to any potential objections or counter-examples to her argument? Briefly explain the objections she considers. Are these counter-examples and objections relevant? Explain how she responds to them. Are they good responses? 10.) Is the conclusion of the paper a good summary of what has transpired in the paper? Does the conclusion address the significance and/or limitations of the papers results? 11.) What is the papers greatest strength? What is its greatest weakness? Please try to give constructive comments rather than mean-spirited or nasty comments. Your job in this assignment is to help your fellow classmates, so please keep this idea in mind as you write your comment.

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Stanley Werne, Taking Rough Drafts Seriously, Teaching Philosophy 16:1, 1993, 47-57. I instruct the author of the paper being read to go over her own paper during this part to see if she can

catch any mistakes she may have missed. It is best to go over drafts when they are cold, and this is one way to force students to do this.
3

The attentive reader will have noticed that my time frame will not work in a 50 minute class period.

The classes at my university are one hour and fifteen minutes long for MWF classes, and one hour and forty minutes long for TR classes; this allows me the opportunity to give my students extra time to go over their papers. Those teaching shorter classes will have to adjust the time allowed for each paper accordingly.
4

I do not really know why so many students who can write well in other subjects have such a hard time

writing philosophy papers. One possible explanation is given by A. P. Martinich. He writes, One reason [for bad writing in philosophy] is that philosophy often involves the attempt to assign things to their proper categories, and the categories are not clear or are at least difficult to understand. This may help to explain the paper in which a student argued that God is The Right, which resulted in statements like, The right action in any situation is God. I was, to say the least, a bit confused by the end of the paper. The quotation from Martinich comes from: A. P. Martinich, Philosophical Writing, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p. 2.
5

A further reason for this is that students in upper division philosophy classes often find themselves in

many of the same classes, and so they develop friendships that do not exist in the lower division classes.
6

Mark Twain, Mark Twains Notebooks, Albert Bigelow Paine, ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers,

1935), p. 380.
7

I still require students to complete a thesis assignment, even though they are not as valuable as I once

thought. One benefit of this assignment is that I can catch the papers that are simply inappropriate, either because they will not be philosophical, or else because they will be way too ambitious. Dissuading students from beginning these projects is useful. My experience has been, however, that quite a lot of

students will need to change their thesis once they begin to write, and so the thesis assignment is not enough to ensure that their papers have a proper thesis.
8

For some advantages of collaborative learning, see Kenneth A. Bruffee, A Short Course on Writing:

Practical Rhetoric for Teaching Composition Through Collaborative Learning (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985), pp. 1-19.
9

This line of argument was suggested by Douglas Portmore in a discussion of my post on the benefits

and drawbacks of peer review assignments at the ethics blog PEA Soup <http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/>. I would like to thank Doug, and the other commentators, for their advice on this and similar problems.
10

This list of questions has been adapted from a list used by Douglas Portmore. I am indebted to his help

on both the use of this list of questions and to the development of this essay.