Yes Peermark

Since my involvement with the Evidence Based Practice theme for the new Bachelor of Nursing began I have been disappointed that we've been pretty conservative with some of our assignments. But I now think there is a serious danger of missed opportunity here when we could do something more innovative and engaging, better for students and staff.
I'm thinking of http://submit.ac.uk/en_gb/products/peermark
We already have this at Cardiff University, it is an extension of Grademark and Turnitin. We are in process of rolling Grademark out to all our programmes following the biggest UK pilot of the system. I want students to anonymously mark one (or more) their peers' assignments, with a right of appeal to the academic who would normally perform the 1st marker role. I am asking for this because, for the first time in about ten years, I have been engaged in 'proper' marking (for our PGCE programme). You probably think I want to avoid the task. Actually I have realised again what a powerfully generative learning experience it is. I find myself incredibly motivated to check my own understanding, root about in the literature, and come to a conclusion I feel I can defend. This is why markers are able to stay current with the topic they teach and assess. It seems immoral we should continue to keep all that intrinsic motivation to ourselves. Since we have already adopted Grademark, Peermark is within easy reach. If we can find a way to do this for merely the students' first assignment, we should.
The workflow would only need to be adjusted slightly. Bring the deadline for submission a week forward, giving students a week to mark one of their peers papers. Peermark has a sophisticated answer to the issue of non-engagement by the students (see their FAQs):

Reviews written for papers in a PeerMark assignment can be graded after the PeerMark assignment's due date. To grade an individual review click on "Edit Grades" at the expanded student's list of reviews. Then enter a score on a scale of 0-10 for the individual review. The average score (as a percentage) for all the reviews a student has written will be calculated and applied to the total point value for the assignment (e.g. if a student was assigned two reviews and received a 5/10 for one review and a 7/10 for the second review, the student would receive 60% of the total points possible for the assignment as a default final grade). Click "Save Grades" to save the review scores that have been entered. To edit the final grade for a student's PeerMark assignment after entering grades for individual reviews, enter the preferred score in the Grade column to the right of the student's name before clicking "Save Grades".

University of Glamorgan have been here already (of course!): see this poster. I love the quote, 'sometimes I feel I do not have enough knowledge to mark my mates'. That is the critical moment of realisation which should prompt the individual into active learning. It is not a negative, as presented in the findings, but a major positive. 

WebPA

WebPA was on the boil a few years ago and seemed to fade from sight like too many good projects.
Now it has been updated and could well be coming to a University near me soon.
I got to test-drive it today. I was trying to replicate a peer assessment I use Bristol Online Surveys for normally.
I opted out of using the VLE as the survey tool there can't handle the types of questions I need to use to do peer assessment.
Here are some observations from my quick trial which included the full cycle of uploading data through to viewing reports.

1. Uploading data was a bit tricky using CSV files... I think it required me to include the headers.... 
2. There was only one 'Template' for uploading staff/student data and it does not include the 'group' header... so needed to be added in. If you vary from the prescribed syntax it fails to upload... or at least it seemed that way... I say 'seemed to' because one of the uploads I thought had failed and that did not appear straight away, re-appeared later on... 
3. The first time I met the form it requires a student to score themselves (self assessment) by default but this can be changed in 'Assessments' so that you can do peer not self AND peer assessment. 
4. Nice to be able to email those who have responded or those who have not. 
5. Setting the group marks was intuitive. 
6. As a student fills in the form it highlights clearly where the student missed a score after having tried to submit a form. 
7. You can also penalise students in the scoring if they do not respond. Perhaps this should be the same as the maximum percentage of marks they could have potentially obtained from the peer assessment? Need to see that one coming and make a policy decision.

I think WebPA is a lot nicer to administer than my current approach, where I am clearly using a generic survey tool, rather than something especially designed for the task. WebPA also offers an alternative scoring system whereby students are required to share a certain amount of 'score' between the group members. That way they cannot all simply award each other top marks. Again, this would require some thought and expectations management before launching the assessment.