Peer review is one of the best ways for students to learn: reading someone else's work sharpens your read on your own. Folio's peer review makes it fair and anonymous, without the spreadsheet-and-email choreography that usually sinks it.
For instructors: setting it up
Once at least two students have submitted, open the assignment's roster and choose Assign peer reviews, then pick how many reviews each student does (1 to 5, 2 by default). Only students who have submitted take part. Folio allocates reviewers with a balanced round-robin: every student reviews the same number of peers, and every submission receives the same number of reviews. No one gets overloaded and no one gets skipped.
Each reviewer is given read and comment access to exactly the submissions they've been assigned, and nothing else. If more students submit later, Reassign peer reviews adds reviews for them; it keeps the reviews already assigned, so the load can end up slightly uneven.
Peer review isn't available on group assignments.
Anonymous in both directions
Authors see what their reviewers wrote, never who wrote it. A reviewer's comments, the notifications about them and the author's list of people with access all show Peer reviewer, with no name or email.
Reviewers see the submissions they're given as "Peer submission 1", "Peer submission 2" and so on, and Folio doesn't give them the author's name or email anywhere: in Shared with me the submission reads Anonymous peer submission, comments by the author read Author, other reviewers read Peer reviewer, and the copy a reviewer downloads or prints carries no author details and no certificate link. Reviewers also don't get the document's live chat or the row of avatars showing who else has it open, since both would name people.
Folio doesn't rewrite the submission itself, so a name in its title or text still shows. For a fully blind review, ask students to leave their names out of the documents they submit. As the instructor, you still see everyone by name, on the roster and in the comments on the submissions you collected.
Peer review works the same way for video assignments: reviewers watch instead of reading, and the identity mechanism is unchanged — no name, email, or certificate link reaches them. But a video can show a presenter's face and voice, which a written submission never does, so "blind" there only ever means the reviewer isn't told who they're watching, not that the presenter is unidentifiable from the recording itself. Folio tells students this on the review screen for video assignments.
On the roster, Peers 4.2/5 · 2 shows the average rating a student's submission received and from how many reviews.
For students: giving a review
When you're assigned reviews, they appear on the assignment page under Peer reviews assigned to you. Read each submission, then rate it and leave a short note, or, if the assignment has grading criteria, score every criterion. You can revise a review after submitting it; a second read often changes your mind, and that's fine. Take the note seriously: it's the part the author will actually use.
Getting your feedback back
Once reviews are in, each author sees a Feedback from your peers section on their own submission: the ratings and notes their classmates left, gathered in one place. It's feedback you can act on before a grade, from readers who just sat with the same assignment.
Tips
- Give students grading criteria or a prompt. "What's the strongest and weakest part of this argument?" produces better notes than a bare rating.
- Model a good review once. A single worked example of a useful, specific, kind review sets the tone for the whole class.
- Use it as a draft stage. Peer review lands best between a draft and a final version, while there's still time to act on it.
Related: Folio Classroom for instructors · Sharing and collaborating