How to set up weights

How do weights work in Peergrade?

David Kofoed Wind avatar
Written by David Kofoed Wind
Updated over a week ago

When using Peergrade as a part of the evaluation of students, it is often meaningful to specify different weighting for different parts of the class. There are four levels of weights that can be set in Peergrade:

  • Weight between submission score and feedback score

  • Assignment weights

  • Section weights

  • Question weights

By default the following weighting applies:

  • Submissions are as important as feedback

  • All assignments in a course are equally important

  • Each question in an assignment is equally important

Combined score settings

It is possible to change the weighting between how much a student's submission count in comparison to their feedback when computing the combined score. This can be specified in Class Settings under Combined score settings. Click Change weights to change the weights.

To read about how the submission and feedback score is computed check out:

Assignment weights

Be default all assignments will have equal importance when computing scores in Peergrade. To change this go to Class Settings and look for Assignment weights.

If an assignment has a weight of 2, then that assignment will count twice as much as an assignment with weight 1 when computing a score. Likewise, if you specify that an assignment has weight 0.25, then that assignment will only count a fourth of an assignment with a weight of 1.

Section and question weights

By default all questions and sections in an assignment will have equal weight. 

If you wish to enable weights on sections and questions you need to go to assignment settings, then Rubric and check the checkbox for Enable weighting of sections and questions

With weights enabled it is now possible to change the weight of each section and question in the Rubric Editor. To assign a weight to a section, click the edit button in the secition header. This will open a modal where you can edit the section title and specify the weight. A weight of 1 is the default.

To assign a weight to a question, click edit on the question. Specify the weight for the question in the field at the bottom of the popup. A weight of 1 is the default. It is only possible to assign weights to questions of the type Scale and Yes / No. Optional questions counts towards the final score if it is being answered. If it's not answered it will not be counted towards the final score.

Example of how weights apply

To understand how weights work, here's a small example. Assume that you have a single assignment with 2 sections, that the first section has 3 questions and that the second section has 2 questions:

  • Section 1 with question 1, question 2 and question 3

  • Section 2 with question 4, question 5

If there were no weights, the average score would be calculated as:

Total = (Q1 + Q2 + Q3 + Q4 + Q5) / 5

Now assume that Section 1 has a section weight of 2 and Section 2 has a section weight of 1:

  • Section 1: Weight = 2

  • Section 2: Weight = 1

Assume that the questions have weights:

  • Question 1: Weight = 1

  • Question 2: Weight = 2

  • Question 3: Weight = 0.5

  • Question 4: Weight = 1

  • Question 5: Weight = 0.5

With these weights, the score for the two sections will be calculated as:

Section 1 total = S1 = (1 * Q1 + 2 * Q2 + 0.5 * Q3) / (1 + 2 + 0.5)
Section 2 total = S2 = (1 * Q4 + 0.5 * Q5) / (1 + 0.5)

and the total score would be

Total = (2 * S1 + 1 * S2) + (2 + 1)

Did this answer your question?