Improving Grading Fairness and Transparency with Decentralized Collaborative Peer Assessment

Abstract

Computer-assisted collaborative peer grading is a developing growth area in academic evaluation. However, peer assessment often needs help with problems such as the lack of reliability, transparency, fairness, grading speed, and motivation to participate among students. The literature suggests several principles that each partly address the said issues. We propose a novel decentralized approach to academic peer assessment, using blockchain as an underlying technology, to address the principal problems in traditional peer assessment. We also derive design concepts for a modern courseware (CW) application consisting of our method and apply them to implement our approach in a CW called Blockment. We test the effectiveness of our method and system by running quantitative and qualitative experiments, proving our claims of improving reliability, transparency, fairness, grading speed, and motivation of grades in peer assessment. The results suggest embedding our method and system in academic courses to improve conventional peer grading methods.