Psych student? Watch your back.

A controversial peer-marking system used in a UTSC psychology course has TA unions in a furor over the farmed-out work. It has students even angrier at having their first-year marks placed in their classmates’ hands.

CUPE 3902, the union representing TAs and sessional lecturers at U of T’s three campuses, announced on Tuesday that they have filed an official grievance with U of T over the use of the program in the popular Introduction to Psychology class taught at the Scarborough campus.

Currently, students in the course are required to evaluate and grade the work of their peers on two assignments, using the internet-based program. CUPE argues that, because all marking and grading done at the university is paid employment and the assignments being peer-reviewed online contribute to final grades, the students currently participating in this required component of peer-evaluation are entitled to be paid for their work. However, they maintain that this only underscores the fact that determining grades should only be done by hired, qualified, trained and experienced TAs.

The professor who created the program three years ago was quick to defend it, however.

“No TA hours have ever been lost to , if anything, they would be lost if was dropped,” said psychology professor Steve Joordens.

Joordens and graduate student Dwayne Paré created the program to address a generally recognized deficit in critical thinking and writing skills in the introductory psychology course, but in a way that didn’t require additional financing and that provided feedback from multiple sources. In the program’s marking method, five anonymous students each give an assignment a grade and comment, with the highest and lowest marks dropped to eliminate extremes.

“We just couldn’t do it [the traditional way] with 1,400 students. This way, the student gains critical analytical skills that they can apply to their own work.”

One of the concerns commonly raised by CUPE and students regarding is the issue of a significant number of peers unfairly grading these assignments for various reasons, resulting in many or all marks being lower than deserved.

Jemy Joseph, vice president academics at the Life Science Students’ Union, supported the intention of the program, noting a lack of critical thinking and writing skills among students in many upper-year science courses as well. However, she points to many examples in which unfair grading did occur during her time in the course.

“It’s a lot of marks to place in the hands of your fellow students who are competing against you. There are students who will think, ‘I do not want anyone to getting a higher mark, so I will grade everyone unfairly.’

“The worst was after the first assignment where many students got poor grades while handing out high grades and ended up resorting to only giving bad grades no matter how well done the second assignment was,” she added.

Rob Wulkan, vice president academics of the Scarborough Campus Students’ Union, has heard from many students unhappy with having the program used to mark their work, and had seen a significant number of complaints about this in the course’s final Student Course Evaluations.

“Course evaluations consistently state for PSYA01 that students do not want the peer evaluation process and feel that it is an unfair measure of their grade,” Wulkan said. “They don’t feel that their peers are qualified the way a TA would be and very often feel that their mark doesn’t reflect the mark they should get.

First-year student Simra Aziz disagrees. “It’s a great program,” she insists. “The whole point of is realizing what you did wrong. Without this, you would just have the midterm and the final.”

Rob Steiner, U of T’s assistant vice president of strategic communications, said that “The university recognizes real pedagogical [science or teaching] value and merit in Professor Joorden’s work.”

Steiner added that the grievances will be reviewed during the next couple of weeks.

Joordens also took exception to the wording of CUPE’s statement.

“It’s like they’re comparing [the course] to a sweatshop.”