Launch HN: Peergrade (YC S17) – Student to Student Feedback http://ift.tt/2wgZCSN

Launch HN: Peergrade (YC S17) – Student to Student Feedback I am David of Peergrade ( http://ift.tt/1qWHJov ). Peergrade is a tool for educators to run peer feedback and peer assessment sessions with their students. Peer feedback is a way to train skills like critical thinking, constructing arguments and how to give and receive feedback - all skills that we believe will be even more important in the job market of the future. I teach a university course in data science at The Technical University of Denmark. Two years ago my course suddenly grew from 20 to 150 students (I changed the title to include "big data"). To overcome the sudden explosion in students, I started working on Peergrade. The idea was that I could save some time on grading papers, the students could write better feedback than me since they had more time per paper, they would learn from reading and assessing each others work and I could reallocate the time I saved to more impactful things like mentoring students. One of the things we heard from teachers that had tried peer feedback before was that it was challenging to motivate students to write helpful feedback. One of the ways we try to solve this is by letting students assess the feedback they receive, consequently giving a clear incentive for writing helpful feedback. To combat gaming and unfair assessments, students give feedback anonymously and they can flag feedback which they disagree with for moderation by the teacher. Since students are able to flag and counter-argue the feedback they receive, they also spend more time reading and thinking about the feedback. Today Peergrade is used in institutions around the world, all the way from 4th grade to higher education, across all subjects and with class sizes from just 5 students to thousands of students. We look forward to answering any questions you might have about our product, tech-stack or vision for the future :). September 25, 2017 at 11:01PM