Amid all the troubling reports of problems with the new, national education standards implementation, there is chatter about instituting “Common Core” at colleges.

University of California – Los Angeles student Samah Pirzada takes look at science course peer review system at her school, which is similar in concept to some Common Core approaches.

Like Common Core, it is filled with problems and unintended consequences.

Calibrated Peer Review is an online program designed to develop critical thinking skills by giving students the opportunity to evaluate their peers’ work. CPR introduces students to academic writing, including in the field of sciences, and the practice gets them to think critically about their own work. The program is great for professors overloaded with work, but not for students with the same problem.

But the unclear and subjective grading process for CPR assignments limits students’ grading capabilities by requiring them to stick to a strict grading rubric created by the professor. Rather than use a system that forces classmates to compete with one another, professors should craft teaching methods that encourage students to collaboratively understand the course material they’re supposed to be learning.

Arlene Russell, a chemistry professor at UCLA, developed the program in 1999 and UCLA students have been stressed about grading their peers ever since.

Each CPR assignment has three components: writing, calibration training and peer review.

First, students write and submit an essay on a specific topic. Then, students are trained in the evaluation process. Finally, the students are randomly assigned peers’ work to evaluate. All of the grading is anonymous to the students but not to the teachers. In the end, students also evaluate their own work.

This leads to an unnecessarily competitive environment. CPR assignments end up adding to the students’ workloads without actually teaching students the intended lessons about scholarly writing.

…CPR adds extra steps to students’ workloads, essentially forcing them to act as both the student and the teacher. Though graduate students are expected to be able to effectively evaluate the work of students during their time as teaching assistants, undergraduates shouldn’t be expected to take on the same responsibility. After all, undergraduates signed up to learn science and haven’t made the additional commitment to learn science education.

The added requirements leave little time for students using CPR to actually learn the key concepts of a class.

“Students are given so much work within these lab classes that it’s really hard for us to take the time to actually learn the stuff we are being tested on through CPRs,” said Sunny Shah, a third-year neuroscience student. “Most students actually just follow a format of writing instead of taking the time to relate concepts given in class with the CPR write-ups.”

Rigid adherence to the professor’s rubric simply does not coincide with the stated purpose of critical thinking about a peer’s writing.