Peer Evaluations - Worthwhile?

[thedoctor8706]

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I'm just wondering if anyone else has been in this situation. I'm pretty sure most schools do this, but recently we were given the opportunity to evaluate our lab partners for anatomy labs. We were scaled by each of our peers on marks such as self directed learning, professionalism, punctuality, etc. After this has happened, these evaluations become a part of our lab grade.

Well apparently, someone in my group of 4 has some kind of problem with me. I wouldn't take it personally except now I have some kind of educational disciplinary action going on my record, whatever that means, based on one person given me mostly negative responses. According to this person, I was ranked severely negative in pretty much all but three categories, and then in the comments section, he/she wrote that I was "never showing initiative to stay involved when in wasn't my turn to take the lead" or "doesn't seam to take the initiative in learning." Which is all bull s*** because my lab practical test grades are soaring. Like I said, I wouldn't take it personally if it didn't affect my grade. But now I'm all thrown off because I was pretty sure our group was efficient and worked well together.

Maybe I just need to vent, but has anyone else in their first year had a problem with this? I know people get destroyed by their teachers and what not later in the 3rd & 4th years, but by one of my peers in a little anatomy course... I mean come on, really? What do you want from me? Why not man up and talk to me first before you take it out on professional evaluations? Makes me wonder if peer evaluations this early in our education are really worth anything...

 

[Droopy Snoopy]

I'm just wondering if anyone else has been in this situation. I'm pretty sure most schools do this, but recently we were given the opportunity to evaluate our lab partners for anatomy labs. We were scaled by each of our peers on marks such as self directed learning, professionalism, punctuality, etc. After this has happened, these evaluations become a part of our lab grade.

Well apparently, someone in my group of 4 has some kind of problem with me. I wouldn't take it personally except now I have some kind of educational disciplinary action going on my record, whatever that means, based on one person given me mostly negative responses. According to this person, I was ranked severely negative in pretty much all but three categories, and then in the comments section, he/she wrote that I was "never showing initiative to stay involved when in wasn't my turn to take the lead" or "doesn't seam to take the initiative in learning." Which is all bull s*** because my lab practical test grades are soaring. Like I said, I wouldn't take it personally if it didn't affect my grade. But now I'm all thrown off because I was pretty sure our group was efficient and worked well together.

Maybe I just need to vent, but has anyone else in their first year had a problem with this? I know people get destroyed by their teachers and what not later in the 3rd & 4th years, but by one of my peers in a little anatomy course... I mean come on, really? What do you want from me? Why not man up and talk to me first before you take it out on professional evaluations? Makes me wonder if peer evaluations this early in our education are really worth anything...

We never had anything like this, and it sounds like a terrible idea. It does make you look forward to the subjective nature of clinical years and beyond though, doesn't it? Vent away. For future reference I think it'd be worthwhile to find out which of your partners is the two-faced sneak, not sure how you'd go about doing that without causing a big fuss though.

 

[cpants]

Based on one peer eval, they are taking academic disciplinary action against you. That sounds highly unlikely. How much were these evals worth?

We had these in a anatomy lab but they were worth a total of 2 points on the whole class and were done every 2 weeks or so. So with a group of 5 students and 5 evals by each, each one ended up being worth about .08 points. In my opinion they are a good thing, as long as they don't count toward too much of your grade. I remember one student got poor evals b/c she was always unprepared for TBL and didn't contribute. She ended up getting pissed off at the groupmates, but you know what? Her performance greatly improved.

 

[mvenus929]

We have student evaluations every few weeks, and there have been talks about making it part of our grade or not. I feel like most of my class thinks that either they want real feedback and they don't make it a part of our grade, or they make it part of our grade and get mostly positive feedback (kind of a 'I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine' thing).

 

[da8s0859q]

I'm just wondering if anyone else has been in this situation. I'm pretty sure most schools do this, but recently we were given the opportunity to evaluate our lab partners for anatomy labs. We were scaled by each of our peers on marks such as self directed learning, professionalism, punctuality, etc. After this has happened, these evaluations become a part of our lab grade.

Well apparently, someone in my group of 4 has some kind of problem with me. I wouldn't take it personally except now I have some kind of educational disciplinary action going on my record, whatever that means, based on one person given me mostly negative responses. According to this person, I was ranked severely negative in pretty much all but three categories, and then in the comments section, he/she wrote that I was "never showing initiative to stay involved when in wasn't my turn to take the lead" or "doesn't seam to take the initiative in learning."

This is a big reason why I think "peer" evaluations are ****ing terrible ideas. No classmate of yours is in any place to be telling you that you "don't show initiative to stay involved when it wasn't your turn" or that you "don't seem to take the initiative in learning." It would be suiting if this person received an eval one day which said "highly judgmental" and "sanctimonious passive-aggressive person who I would try my hardest not to work with."

We had to evaluate classmates at one point, and sure enough, a lot of people were annoyed about having to do so, and quite a few were bitter about some of the comments they received, several of which were pretty undeserved. There was a little backlash over it as well. Taking a bunch of classmates and asking them to "evaluate" each other is just begging for people to turn personality differences into character flaws. Any issues important enough to be complained about on an evaluation should have already been brought up to the person face to face, like adults do.

Evals will always have some subjectivity, but leave them to M3 and beyond, where at least they're coming from someone above you who at least has something on which to base his opinions.

/rant

 

[Mr hawkings]

Your school took disciplinary action against you based on the evaluation of a classmate? That seems odd to me. i would care much about the negative evals if it was not for this

 

[thedoctor8706]

Apparently the evaluation system scores you based on negative responses and flags you to the professors. So if you are getting one constant negative score in a category from everyone then I guess that makes sense (Though I think them saying one is under educational disciplinary action is a bit dramatic IMO). I talked with a professor and once they saw that all the negative comments came from one person and were in clear contrast to the others, he agreed that there was probably something else going on, so I'm safe for now. I really hope he wasn't trying to gain some sort of advantage. I didn't think some people would be gunning or cut throat yet, but I'm probably just naive in that regard. I really was thinking like was posted above, you know, we're all working together here, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Oops.

 

[thedoctor8706]

This is a big reason why I think "peer" evaluations are ****ing terrible ideas. No classmate of yours is in any place to be telling you that you "don't show initiative to stay involved when it wasn't your turn" or that you "don't seem to take the initiative in learning." It would be suiting if this person received an eval one day which said "highly judgmental" and "sanctimonious passive-aggressive person who I would try my hardest not to work with."

We had to evaluate classmates at one point, and sure enough, a lot of people were annoyed about having to do so, and quite a few were bitter about some of the comments they received, several of which were pretty undeserved. There was a little backlash over it as well. Taking a bunch of classmates and asking them to "evaluate" each other is just begging for people to turn personality differences into character flaws. Any issues important enough to be complained about on an evaluation should have already been brought up to the person face to face, like adults do.

Evals will always have some subjectivity, but leave them to M3 and beyond, where at least they're coming from someone above you who at least has something on which to base his opinions.

/rant

Exactly