How to grade your peers in the homework program (Fluid Dynamics with Olivier Cleynen)

hi it’s a beautiful spring day and I’m on my way to work from my living apartment to my work apartment and I thought that I’d record the video on my bicycle to try to save time and just to have a little fun so last night about 160 emails arrived in the fluidmech inbox for the first homework assignment and I’d like to say first how incredibly honored I am that so many of you participate in this how much work you all put into this it’s very honoring and I’ll try to live up to that so thanks so much for your participation now the main question I get when students participate in this kind of assignment is uh why should other students grade me why don’t you grade me Olivier? I don’t want to be graded by students I want to be graded by a teacher a professional and there are several elements to the answer the first answer is that there is no time for me to grade 160 papers four times during the semester plus the final exam there’s not enough physical time it’s not possible for me to do this we designed this whole program homework program with this in mind that it’s only possible to do if students grade themselves grade their own peers and so it’s just not doable there is already not enough time for me to just spend time answering one email per student every week so there’s no way I’m gonna grade a whole a whole bunch of homework papers second an exam a traditional exam where you have a question you put an answer and the teacher grades you this is not reality and so you will have to put in effort in your work when you work for a company in just a few months you will have to work with colleagues and some colleagues are having a good day some colleagues are having a bad day some colleagues like you some colleagues don’t like you this is the actual reality of the engineering job and so this assignment prepares you a little bit for that by taking to account that you are graded by peers not graded by a super-duper expert and finally I think that the opportunity to grade your peers is helpful it actually forces you to think a little bit about the assignments and try to debug papers identify errors try to quantify the points for each question so I think it’s a very good thing that students can grade themselves and that it’s not the top-of- the-mountain know-it-all teacher who is giving students points but the students themselves okay so there are three categories for grading the papers the first category is giving the general expression and this is the most hated category the most hated rubric in general by students because it’s very difficult to write the general expression the general expression is the answer without any numbers in it it’s just a one line or two lines expression where you have the complete final answer that people are looking for but with no numbers it happens very often that this component is spread all over the paper in little bits and pieces with this very bad if the customer comes to you and tells you oh what if I change the parameter X how does that affect the result you don’t want to be saying oh oh I have to do everything back again— back from scratch again you want to be able to tell them oh sure let me just update this value actually let me let me make a graph that shows you how your input parameter affects the final result and so this general formula that you have is the best tool to do that so you should give points in this rubric only if you have somewhere clear in a clear way written the general answer to the question 2nd rubric is whether the correct numbers I put in somebody’s on the way the recovery team’s on the way to an engineer who didn’t put the correct final results in the second rubric you assess whether the correct numbers are put into this general equation and this is mostly about putting the correct numbers with the correct units as an engineer you should not mess up radians with degrees m/s with kilometers per hour and so forth so that particular question that particular rubric assesses whether the correct numbers are put in a general equation even if the general equation is wrong you can put all points in this rubric if all the correct numbers are put in there and the final rubric is whether the final result has the correct unit and makes sense check the units very carefully and check whether the results generally make sense it has some physical meaning by this I mean it should not be more than 10 times too high or 10 times too low the engineer should always check that the result makes some kind of sense you don’t want to be calculating a thrust on the rocket that’s six million times too high or six million times too low you don’t want to be calculating the mass of an object that is six times the mass of the earth so every time you write a result something in your mind should be telling you does that make sense is it realistic or not and this is what you assess in this final rubric so even if the result is wrong if it has the correct units and if it makes sense then I want you to put full points into it then finally you have a little rubric where you can remove points arbitrarily for presentation and cleanliness and where you can put comments should you remove points into this the answer is you should remove points if you feel this is not a professional document your colleagues in just a few months when you enter a company will send you documents and you will send your colleagues documents you’re not expecting a perfect absolutely beautiful answer you’re expecting something you can work with something where when there are mistakes you can fix them you can identify them you can fix them quickly and efficiently and so if the document is very poorly formatted if it’s super ugly if when you open it you feel like ah why do I have to read this then you should definitely remove points I will not question that this is your own personal decision finally for the comments what kind of comments you put in there well what do we want in this thing remember we do not want students to produce documents that are absolute perfection we do not want masterpieces we want professional quality documents documents that help people work this is the goal help your peers get there so if the document is useful it is easy to read it is easy to debug even if it’s wrong then you should comment on this and you should congratulate the students for that if however we are not there yet let me slow down a little bit so I don’t bump into people don’t wanna fall off my bike on the video if the student is not there yet then be constructive and tell them what you would expect if you were in a professional setting if they were your colleague why you would expect to receive in an email so that you can see the customer the next day and be confident about it so this overall I hope gives you an idea of how to handle grading your own peers I look really forward to seeing all your comments and all the grades and to answer any questions you have in Q&A sessions on Friday and Zoom so take care and see you later .