Everything you’ll need to know to be successful in your Kritik course!
Written by Philip Tran
Updated over a week ago
Overview:
Whether you’ve used Kritik before or are learning about the platform for the first time, this article will teach you how to be successful in your course.
What is the purpose of Kritik, what are we trying to accomplish? We believe that you will become a stronger critical thinker through peer evaluation. Founded upon the science of Bloom’s Taxonomy, Kritik aims to develop students’ higher-order and critical thinking skills through peer assessment. Traditionally, students tend to operate at the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (memorize, understand, apply). That’s not to say that you’re doing things wrong if you’re able to learn this way! Everyone learns differently and at their own pace. However, it’s been proven that students’ can learn much more effectively when they unlock their higher-order thinking skills: Analyze, Evaluate, and Create. With Kritik, students are able to build on these skills by completing thoughtful peer evaluations that will require them to analyze and identify problems, and provide helpful solutions. You’re engaging with course content in more interesting and unique ways, and developing skills that will help you far beyond just the course you’re taking.
The Creation stage of an activity is the part that you are probably more familiar with. Like traditional assignments, you will be given instructions from your professor and will be asked to provide a submission during the creation stage. The goal here is to submit a high-quality assignment for your peers to evaluate. Your overall creation score will be determined by the weighted average grade given to you by your peer evaluators. In the case that you feel like the grade you received is not an accurate representation of your work, you can dispute the score and have your professor or TA grade it instead. You can read more about how Kritik ensures fair grading here.
Depending on the course, the weight of your creation towards your overall mark can vary. Typically, the creation is worth 50% of the assignment, but some courses may have it weighted higher. You can check out the grading scheme of your course by clicking on the Course tab on the left navigation bar.
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The grading scheme will look something like this:
The Evaluation stage is where things start to get interesting in Kritik. In this stage of your activity, you will be assigned a set of peer creations to evaluate. The goal here is to put yourself in the shoes of your prof or TA and to try and evaluate your peers as fairly and accurately as possible. Your evaluation score is broken down into two parts: grading score and written evaluation score.
The grading score is determined by comparing your numeric evaluation of a peer’s creation to how the rest of the class graded them. In the case where a professor manually grades a creation, your evaluation will be compared to theirs instead of the class. Either way, the more accurate your evaluation, the higher your grading score.