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.
This project has contributed to the following academic papers:
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A Blockchain Approach to Academic Assessment
- Authors: Sharareh Alipour, Sina Elahimanesh, Soroush Jahanzad, Parimehr Miorassafar, Seyed Parsa Neshaei
- Conference: CHI '22: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Date: April 2022
- DOI: 10.1145/3491101.3519682
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Improving Grading Fairness and Transparency with Decentralized Collaborative Peer Assessment
- Authors: Sharareh Alipour, Sina Elahimanesh, Soroush Jahanzad, Iman Mohammadi, Parimehr Miorassafar, Seyed Parsa Neshaei, Mojtaba Tefagh
- Journal: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 8(CSCW1)
- Date: April 2024
- DOI: 10.1145/3637350
