Online Code Review: an assessment of student engagement in peer code review

Song, E., Goldstein, S., Sakr, M., et al.

Project-based learning is an effective method to teach students concepts and practical skills. We evaluate whether peer review of assignments in a project-based course can improve student learning and help solve the problem of accurately grading code at scale. Students start by training on a model crafted by instructors and then perform peer reviews. We report on how 120 students performed 557 code review sessions using our system. We focus on grading accuracy and analyze how engagement with the tool affect performance over the course of the semester. Additionally, we discuss our pilot study where we focus on measuring student learning. Participants are asked to complete two coding problems of similar difficulty. Upon completing the first assignment, half of the participants are asked to complete a code review on the first assignment, and finally we compare the performances of the two groups on the second assignment through metrics such as accuracy, time spent, and post quiz results.

Eric Song, Language Technologies Institute
Seth Goldstein, Computer Science Department 
Majd Sakr, Computer Science Department
Marshall An, Computer Science Department
Siddharth Kandimalla, Computer Science Department