Peer Feedback

There will be 7 peer feedback assignments this semester, one for each assignment/project. The Instructors will release Peer Feedback after the closing deadline of an assignment/project. The closing deadline is the 2 late day deadline.

Submit your PDF report on Canvas – There are deductions if you don’t!

In addition to submitting your PDF report on Gradescope for grading, you will be asked to also submit your report on Canvas. The reason for this is because the Peer Feedback system only works with Canvas. The PDF that you submit on Canvas will be uploaded to the Peer Feedback system and then we will assign your report to other students to give feedback on.

During grading, the Instructors will NOT look at the PDF report that you submit on Canvas. We will only look at your GRADESCOPE submission.

If you do not submit your PDF to Canvas by the closing deadline (i.e. the 2 late day deadline), there will be a 3 point additional deduction made against your assignment/project report on Gradescope. If you submit your PDF on Canvas after the on-time deadline, Canvas will mark the assignment as “LATE”, but do not worry about that. For Peer Feedback, just make sure that you get your PDF submitted on Canvas before the 12:00am AoE assignment/project closing deadline.  All reports submitted to Canvas by the 2-day late time are considered on-time for Peer Feedback. Any reports submitted to Canvas after the 2-day late time will receive a 3 point additional deduction to the overall assignment/project grade. This additional deduction will appear on Gradescope under the report grading section.

We will only look at the date and time that you submitted on Gradescope when applying late penalties to your assignment/project as noted in the Course Syllabus Section III B.

If you do submit your report on Canvas after the assignment/project’s closing deadline, but still within the peer feedback window for that assignment/project, your report can still get randomly assigned to other students. Again, there will be the 3 point additional deduction, but we suggest you submit anyways in case your report gets assigned to someone for feedback. Also, on the Peer Feedback site, you can choose the “Get Feedback” option from the assignment view.

Complete at least 2 Peer Feedback Tasks – Quality Matters!

Completing peer feedback counts towards your participation grade in the course. In order to receive full credit, you are required to complete two feedback tasks of good quality, and they must be submitted on-time on the Peer Feedback Site. Avoid giving unhelpful feedback, for example – “Good job!”, “Results need work”, “Wow!”. You will not receive credit for poor quality feedback. Please follow the suggestions given in the last section below on giving good feedback. If you only complete the grading rubric part and do not write any / really poor feedback, you will receive a zero. There is no partial credit for only filling out the grading rubric. You must fill out the grading rubric and give good quality feedback in order to get full credit for each task. 

Even if you think a report is good, highlight what you think they did well on, explain what you think can be improved on, give your own suggestions, or mention what you did that you think can be helpful. If everyone just does the standard ‘Good job’ brief kind of answers, then this peer feedback exercise is pretty useless for everyone because no one will get anything out of it. We are not grading on correctness, in other words, we are not analyzing your suggestions to others and determining whether what you suggest to the student is right or wrong. It’s up to the receiving student to take a closer look at any suggestions you give, maybe test them out, and see whether they agree or disagree with you. That’s all part of the learning process. We do not expect a New York Times giant review, but do more than just a brief few sentences and show you put effort into it. There are students who use the feedback given to help them learn, so see if you can help them out.

If there is something wrong with the submission(s) you were initially assigned, select the “Missing, incorrect or corrupt?” option to either retry fetching the submission, or replace the task. If this does not work, message the Instructors on Ed. It is REQUIRED that you submit at least two COMPLETED feedbacks. Leaving a comment that you are unable to view their report or they submitted the wrong report does NOT count as completed feedback.

If you were granted an emergency extension, do NOT open and view your assigned peer feedback reports until AFTER you submit your assignment/project. Do not even navigate to the PF site until after you submit your own work. Reviewing answers and results belonging to other students before you even submit your own is considered an honor code violation and will be reported.

Extra Peer Feedback

If you want to give extra feedback to other students, you are allowed 5 additional review tasks. You can either pair yourself up at random by selecting the “Pick a peer for me” option, or you can choose who specifically you want to give feedback to by providing a name or email address. Although completing additional feedback does not count towards your grade, please consider helping others. Your feedback may help your peers improve upon their work and will also give you a chance to see how others completed the assignment/project and you may learn something that can help for your future work!

If you want to receive extra feedback on your own report than what you received so far, select the “Get Feedback” option. If somebody selects to give extra feedback, your report will be assigned.

Late Submission of Required Peer Feedback Tasks

As mentioned in the Course Syllabus, if you miss the on-time deadline, you will still have a chance to earn some points for submitting late feedback. There will be a 4 day late window after the due date to submit your assigned feedback, with a deduction of 10 pts per late day per required feedback task. Submissions after this window closes will earn a 0. Each of the 2 required Peer Feedback tasks is worth 50 points.

The late penalties for Peer Feedback are calculated similar to how the late penalties for the assignments/projects are calculated.

For example, if Assignment 4 Peer Feedback was due January 1 at 12am AoE, any task submitted on :

• • January 1 at 12:01am AoE – January 2 at 12am AoE is considered 1 day late and you will lose 10 points
  • January 2 at 12:01am AoE – January 3 at 12am AoE is considered 2 days late and you will lose 20 pts.
  • January 3 at 12:01am AoE – January 4 12am AoE is considered 3 days late and you will lose 30 pts.
  • January 4 at 12:01am AoE – January 5 12am AoE is considered 4 days late and you will lose 40 pts.
  • January 5 at 12:01am AoE onwards will receive a score of 0 for that task.

Here are a few examples of how late penalty calculations will work:

• • Example 1: Submit feedback1 1 day late, and feedback2 3 days late, student’s score will start at a 60% (40pts for feedback1 and 20pts for feedback2). 
  • Example 2: Submit feedback1 on-time, and feedback2 4 days late, student’s score will start at a 60% (50pts for feedback1 and 10pts for feedback2).
  • Example 3: Submit feedback1 4 days late, and feedback2 4 days late, student’s score will start at a 20% (10pts for feedback1 and 10pts for feedback2).

Giving Good Feedback

Overall, Peer Feedback is an opportunity for you all to learn from each other, and to provide some guidance on areas you think could use improvement. Quality of feedback will be taken into consideration during grading. If you see a really great assignment, encourage the submitter to share and participate in discussion on Ed when we open up threads for community discussion on that assignment. Seeing the creativity and discussing the code choices (if any) of others is a great way to learn and improve in this class.

Pedagogically, good feedback has several common traits:

• Relevant – good feedback focuses on details and issues that pertain to the assignment, rather than extraneous details. Make it clear where your feedback is subjective, and avoid criticism directed at stylistic or non-functional decisions.

  • Do: Your report mentioned that you were only able to get 5/10 on the flipHorizontal() function, but I see from your report that the image was flipped vertically. Try switching the rows & columns in your function to change the reflection axis.

  • Do Not: I see that you used the default template for your report, but that’s lame. Changing the theme is a great way to make things really POP!

• Specific – good feedback makes actionable suggestions and offers targeted praise.

  • Do: The performance of your fooBarBaz() function could be improved by avoiding python loops. One way to do that in this case is by using logical indexing (see the Numpy docs https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/user/basics.indexing.html#boolean-or-mask-index-arrays.)

  • Do Not: Your work looks fine, but it’s inefficient.

• Positive – criticism should be constructive, and praise should be genuine rather than hyperbolic

  • Do: Your code was very easy to read and follow, but you may be able to improve performance by replacing for loops with vectorized operations from NumPy and OpenCV.

  • Do Not: Your pictures are terrible! You really need to get a tripod.

Additional Resources

To help guide you through the Peer Feedback process, here are a few demo videos on giving feedback, reading feedback, and rating feedback. The interface has changed a bit from the time these videos were taken, but they are still valid.