Peer editing is exactly what it sounds like: students edit their peers’ work and give them feedback, typically for an essay-type assignment. This seems like a great idea—students get feedback, they help each other and best of all, it takes away some of the workload on teachers. On occasion, peer editing can be just as wonderful and effective as it seems, but there is a limit. Peer editing is not as beneficial as teachers who regularly use it seem to think.
In my experience, students filling out a cookie-cutter rubric, the same rubric their teacher will eventually use to grade their essay, is a complete waste of time. Straight rubric grading, except in certain advanced placement courses, without anything more, i.e. any comments, is essentially useless. This is even more the case when months elapse between assignment completion and the calibrated rubric. Notwithstanding that, the odds of students truly taking this task seriously are slim to none, and even if they do, what is to say that the person sitting next to me knows any more about writing than I do? Hypothetically, if everyone followed the guidelines and lessons preceding the essay, arguably there would be no need for peer editing. Every student would know everything the teacher already told them and would not gain anything from their fellow students. Of course, this is not the case, but, in any event, peer editing is simply a time waster.
Some teachers may even go so far as to view peer editing as a substitute for the effort they need to put into a class. Assigning students to evaluate each other’s work not only takes up class time that could be spent on instruction, it also theoretically limits the amount of feedback and teaching required. Instead of educating the class on the best way to go about the assignment, a teacher could use peer editing as a way to sit back and let students teach themselves. Peer editing is the high school equivalent of putting on an episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy or The Magic School Bus and hoping students get something out of it.
Simply put, in a world where class time is precious and students’ attention spans are dwindling, there is little to no place for peer editing. In my experience, the students who genuinely want to learn and get feedback likely need more sophisticated grading than anything peer editing may yield. Those who truly need the help of peer editing, on the other hand, will likely not take the assignment seriously. All of this leads to the end result: no one gets anything out of peer editing. Having a teacher address the full class, be it on foundational information or instructions on how to best approach the assignment, is a far more productive use of class time.
Sometimes, peer editing may be a useful tool if it does not take up too much class time or is for a rough draft. The practice could be helpful to some students, but it is by no means a replacement for true teacher feedback or instruction.
