angry bird part II: lsm essay

Dear Dr Kim,

I am sure you have already heard or received feedback from your LSM 1401 students with regards to the essay assignment. I am also one of your students taking this module for the semester and would like to feedback to you about this issue as well. I think that this system is extremely unfair to be used as a grading system and I hope that you can understand my view on this, of which I will be supporting below.

Dr Kim, you have mentioned that this is a method that has been used for scientific journals, but that point, I feel, is irrelevant to us. This is because although this peer evaluation system is likely to be able to choose the best papers and also to help improve each and everyone’s essay based on the feedback from peers, it does not seem appropriate for grading purposes. Each vote is worth one mark and the chances of one getting a very low score, or even no votes are quite high if their essay is not a very good one compared to the rest. It will all depend on one’s luck in getting grouped with which other four essays. How random is the distribution of the essays to ensure that luck plays an insignificant role? Is three rounds of evaluation enough to reduce this luck factor determining your grade? Furthermore, it is worth so high percentage of the final score for this LSM module. Thus, an assessment carrying so much weightage should be graded with a fairer system.

Moving on, I have seen many many ways in which a student may cheat in this system. True, one might argue that cheating cannot be stopped and its down to the moral integrity of the students. But, given a flawed system with so many easy avenues for cheating, it would seem like an unfair gaining of marks is presented and encouraged.

1. Having access to everyone’s essays.
A student can easily obtain access to EVERYONE’S essays with the current system. Although one can only view essays of another topic currently, viewing other’s essays on a student’s own topic could be easily done by the help of a friend in another topic. He can download ALL the essays and abstract all the original work and research of the other students if he wants to. This system does not protect the writer’s intellectual properties. A student who had spent days to generate an innovative and brilliant idea and put it in his essay could have his idea stolen by many other students.

And with regards to this, it is too late to try to salvage the situation because the damage has been done and students could already have looked at many other essays and even saved copies of it for future reference.

2. Authors of the essay one is marking are no longer anonymous.
The identity of the author has a high chance of being checked by simply looking up the properties of the word document file. If the author had put in his name/matric card number as the author of his Microsoft office, he could be tracked easily. Biasness will now come into place while marking.

3. One could easily check who is marking his essay.
For example, I’m writing on question C and I want to check who is writing my essay. I ask a friend who is in grp A to download all the essay files, I check where are mine, then I check who is marking this essay from the list of markers and the files they are allocated on ivle.

4. Trading votes.
With the two points, 2 and 3, above, it is evident that it is easy to beat the system. A student can strike a deal with the person who is marking his essay to vote for his feedback as the best feedback while he votes his essay as the best essay. A win-win situation is easily obtained. One could argue that the chances of the student knowing the other person might not be high, but this deal could be done even with someone you don’t know. And furthermore, in this system when we could easily cheat, the people with more friends will somehow, gain an added advantage which totally makes no sense to me.

Personally, I have a friend who is marking my essay, and I’m marking another friend’s essay. Thus, if I wanted to, I would have struck two deals and ensured at least two points in this first round of essay submission. By doing so, I might be depriving the student whose essay is really the best among the five I have to evaluate of his one vote just because I want to get a vote from my friend. From my understanding, a huge majority of people would settle for such a deal because everyone wants to get a better score and there is no harm in helping each other out. How many people would actually have the moral integrity to say no to a “free vote”, to a friend?

I think there are many loopholes in this grading system and probably some more that I did not pen down here. I sincerely hope you, Dr Kim, could do something to change this system because I’m very disturbed by the unfair advantages the students are gaining. And even if there is a change, cheating would already have been done in the first round and if the scores are still taken, then it would be unfair to students who work hard and try their best losing out to those to unfairly gain superiority in votes. I believe there are others who share the same viewpoint as me and I hope you too agree with us on our major concerns. If you would like a face-to-face discussion, I’m sure many of us would be available for it.

Thank you for your time Dr Kim, I eagerly await your reply/changes that will be made.


Your concerned LSM1401 student,
Tang Kai Him