The PeerMark package facilitates scalable peer marking assessment for group work exercises. There are two main utilities: generating the marking spreadsheets for distribution to the students, and extracting the data (feedback and marks) they assign to their team mates. The package is written in Python 3.7.
Specific library requirements are
- xlsxwriter
- xlrd
- pypandoc
the last of which is required only if PDF feedback files are required. For pypandoc to render the PDF documents, a system installation of LaTeX is required. The python packages can be installed by executing
pip install pypandoc
or conda install pypandoc
(or whatever package installer you use for python).
There are several ways to install LaTeX.
- you can download MacTex
- you can use macports
sudo port install latex - you can find, download and instal another LaTeX package online
If pypandoc and LaTeX are not installed, you can still execute the program to extract the peer review marks, and the feedback will be saved in markdown format, which can be viewed as plain text if necessary.
In order to generate the spreadsheets, you will need
- A list of your students in csv format (can be output from a spreadsheet for instance).
The student csv file should be in the format [Full Name], [Team Number], [Student ID]. E.G:
Harry Potter,A1,40204635
Hermione Granger,A1,40174358
Ron Weasley,A1,40196189
Draco Malfoy,A1,40197913
Percy Weasley,A2,40204564
Penelope Clearwater,A2,40203899
Lee Jordan,A2,40205211
Lavender Brown,A2,40199802
In principle you could simply number your teams A1-A100 (or however many you need), but you can also add subgroups, e.g. A1-A10, B1-B10, C1-C10, in order to break up the teams by tutorial group, computer class, etc.
- The template spreadsheet
A template is provided in the templates/ directory. You can change the questions the students answer, but should not change the number of questions (yet, unless you want to dig around in the code to account for that change).
- The instructions you want your students to follow.
The instructions will appear in a text box in the spreadsheet the student sees. A sample set of instructions is given in the templates/ directory.
You can edit the templates provided, or, if you prefer, use different files for you templates, which requires you to change the header information in the python scripts so that the templates point to the correct files.