Impact of Social Relationships on Peer Assessment in E-Learning

Peer assessment has been widely studied as a replacement for traditional evaluation, not only by reducing the professors' workload but mainly by benefiting students' engagement and learning. Although several works successfully validate its accuracy and fairness, more research must be done on how students' pre-existing social relationships affect the grades they give their peers in an e-learning course. We developed a Moodle plugin to provide the platform with peer assessment capabilities in forums and used it on an MSc course. The plugin curated the reviewer set for a post based on the author's relationships and included rubrics to counter the possible interpersonal effects of peer assessment. Results confirm that peer assessment is reliable and accurate for works with at least three peer assessments, although students' grades are slightly higher. The impact of social relationships is noticeable when students who do not like another peer grade their work consistently lower than students who have a positive connection. However, this has little influence on the final aggregate peer grade. Our findings show that peer assessment can replace traditional evaluation in an e-learning environment where students are familiar with each other.