Abstract:

A new law was approved recently by the Spanish government. This law involved an increase of the lecturing hours for most university faculty, unless they could prove to have a very strong research record. This new situation has forced universities to look for strategies that optimize the time of faculty members. Our aim is to explore alternatives so that teacher time is optimized, while quality and level of service obtained by the students is maintained or even improved. Of course, this is not an easy task, but we will prove that diminishing teacher time can be beneficial for the students if the professor devotes his time to high value activities.

According to the principles of the Bologna Process, one credit of the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) corresponds to 25 hours of student effort. The wide majority of Spanish universities have established that this corresponds to 10 contact hours, while some understand this should correspond to 10 hours of professor effort.

In this paper we are trying to answer the following question: how can we use the available professor's time on those activities that provide more value to the students? Grading is necessary to provide feedback to the student, but as the class size increases, the further we are from a one-to-one tutoring strategy. Regarding professor time as a valuable resource, we can grade students in an efficient way by using multiple choice exercises, or online forms, although these methodologies have other drawbacks, such as possible ambiguity in the student’s interpretation of the question. Moreover, higher-order reasoning or even problem-solving and skills are difficult to assess using multiple choice, although some faculty still attempt to evaluate these skills through multiple-choice tests. However, how can we grade students regarding their oral competence? Or how do we grade students on critical thinking? As a step towards addressing these questions, this paper presents an experience in which a peer-grading approach is compared to professor-grading.

A central idea of this approach is that grading their peers becomes another learning activity for the students, and they actually learn from the experience. We will show that a very clear rubric, which eliminates ambiguity, is a must to obtain reliable scoring of oral presentations, especially if they are analytic and complemented with exemplars. Moreover, it turns out that peer grading is not only a remarkable strategy for providing reproducible grades, but also rubrics make criteria explicit, which also facilitates feedback and student self-assessment.

Our experience has only been tried in a small class in the fifth year of Computer Engineering, but this already shows a trend that we plan to scale for larger groups. Finally, we show that if students are provided with a comprehensive rubric, there is a strong correlation between student assigned grades and instructor assigned grades.