[Peer Review] Respecting sections when automatically assigning peer reviews

[stelpstra]

Situation

Canvas does not respect the sections when assigning peer reviews when automatically assigning peers in an assignment is set. This means a student from section A might be assigned as peer to a student in section B. This is problematic in case people from Section A and Section B are not collaboratively related.

Suggested solution

1. When automatically assigning peer is enabled, Canvas should by default, respect the section of each student separately to match the section of the peer to be assigned.

2. An option should be available to override limiting by section. This could be done by adding the checkbox "Allow assigning peers from different sections":

   

Example

Lets say the following students in different sections are assigned to the same assignment:

Students	Section
Student A1	A
Student B1	B
Student A2	A
Student B2	B
Student A3	A
Student B3	B
Student A4	A
Student B4	B
Student A5	A
Student B5	B

When Canvas is looping through all students in the assignment to find a peer it should look for the section of each student is in and select a peer from the respective section only. So e.g. Student A4 (from section A) will never be assigned as peer to Student B2.

The suggested solution would work for the following scenarios:

• Assignment with one section assigned where peers are assigned to students from the respective sections
• Assignment with multiple sections or "Everyone" assigned where peers are assigned to students from the respective sections
• Assignment with one section assigned where peers are assigned to students not respective to any section
• Assignment with multiple sections or "Everyone" assigned where peers are assigned to students not respective to any section

This feature request is related to this question Using Peer Review in a course with multiple sections, where the suggested solution appeared not to work.

[KATIEKEYES]

Agreed!

[jillianporter]

Yes, please! Separate sections can have different requirements for the same assignment, so it's important to be able to automatically assign reviewers while respecting the sections.

Thank you!

[nataliet]

I strongly agree.  Being able to automatically assign peer reviews that respect cross-listed sections would be invaluable

[maguire]

It can be done using the API. See the program assign-random-peer-reviewer-by-section.py at https://github.com/gqmaguirejr/Canvas-tools 

As I use sections a lot for large courses, this program comes in handy when assigning peer reviewers within a section. Note that I assume the sections that are to be respected have a name of the form "XXXX's section". The program ignores all sections that do not have a single quote or the word "section" in them. This enables me to have sections named "Dropped the course" or "Inactive" and not assign peer reviews to students in these sections.

I have found using the program that there are some permutations that will not lead to a successful assignment of all students for peer reviews while avoiding self peer-reviewing assignments, not being assigned to review another student in the same project group, and not assigning more than one peer to review. My solution was just to start again with a new permutation, hence starting (hopefully) to assign peer reviews with a different student than the last attempt.

[mamgorman]

Our school need this. Peers in sections need to be able to have this feature. 

[Joost_vd_Hoeven]

It's 2022 and no progress on this? Could really use this now GDRP is mandatory also within schools in Europe.

[BrittanyRenee]

PLEASE!  Haveing my students discuss how/why they edited their peers paper a certain way is a huge part of my peer editing process and it takes so long to assign students manually when all 120 of my students are thrown together in alphabetical order without regard for who actually turned in the assignment.  

[JH95]

When using the "automatically assigning a peer review" option it assigns students from the entire course and does not let the teacher choose which section they would like it to automatically assign students from. This is a problem for cross-listed courses that have different sections based on different periods in Canvas. What is happening is that instead of students in section 1 only peer-reviewing other students in section 1, they are being assigned to peer review students in other sections. 

We also noticed that you can only set a peer review date/time for an assignment for the entire course, instead of having it set by section as well.

Is there any way to make it so that Peer reviews can be assigned by section instead of it being assigned to all the sections in the course? Thank you!

[adaryn]

We need this!

[manthoney]

Please add this functionality. Essential time/resource saver for large cross-listed courses.