Peer Recap part 3

Peer reviewing is a tricky process, because everyone involved needs to be equally prepared and invested in the project. For this third peer review group, out of the 5 people in it, only 1 had their rough draft when we first exchanged email addresses, and one never turned one in at all.

Having one isn't enough either though. When reviewing, the ones who are always well prepared give good advice, offering ideas of where the paper can go, more area for the writer to explore, and corrections to sentence structure and such. However, those same people who turned it in late gave a similar amount of effort to the actual reviewing. They read it until they reach something that seems wrong, make a note of it, make sure they made at least 2 or 3 notes, and then write something nice at the end. This is less than helpful, and typically those students who do go out of their way to add that extra advice are the same ones who turned in the paper early.

I think that this is mostly due to a lack of interest. How much I help someone else does not in any way reflect upon myself as far as grades go. When working on my Three Kingdoms wiki, I noticed a similar phenomena. Whenever someone's name would be added to an article (ie, they get credit for writing it), people were much less inclined to help them. Because they were getting nothing out of it (in terms of respect in this case) most people simply didn't extend that extra little effort.

As a general rule of thumb, I think that finding those people who care as much about your work (or can at least pretend to for long enough to help you) is critical to finding good editors and peer reviewers. Since we cannot pick our groups though, I am unable to put this information to use this time around.