Peer Critique Contribution

Half of what you learn this semester arrives in someone else’s handwriting on a sheet beside your work. This is the ten per cent that pays for the other half.

The facts#

• Submit three written critiques you gave, each with a change note and the recipient’s countersignature, as one document.
• Due Friday 14 May 2027, 5:00 pm (end of week 11).
• Worth 10% of the course.
• Marked against the three weighted criteria at the foot of this page.

This is not a participation mark#

Read this paragraph before you read anything else on the page. You are graded on the written critiques you gave, and on nothing else. Not on attendance. Not on how much you said in the room. Not on whether you are the sort of person who speaks first in a tutorial. A student who attends every session and writes nothing scores zero here; a student who writes three excellent critiques scores full marks regardless of how quiet they were while writing them.

There is a reason the evidence is written. Verbal critique leaves no receipt, and a mark with no receipt behind it is exactly the thing this course spends twelve weeks teaching you to distrust.

What goes in#

Choose the three most substantial critiques you gave across the semester, from any of week 3 (blind review), week 6 (gallery walk), week 8 (red team) or week 11 (artefact swap). For each one, submit:

• The critique as you gave it, unedited. Do not improve it now.
• A short change note — two or three sentences on what it changed in the recipient’s work, or an honest account of why it changed nothing.
• The recipient’s countersignature, confirming they received it and that your change note is accurate. A countersignature is confirmation, not endorsement; your peer is not being asked to say the critique was good.

What separates a strong submission#

Specificity carries 40 marks, and it means critique of a decision, not of the finish on it. “The contrast on your headings is low” is a note about polish. “You opened the case study with the solution, so the reader never finds out what was hard about it” is a note about a decision, and it is the one the author can act on.

Usefulness carries 35, and it is evidenced by what happened next. A critique that was considered and deliberately rejected, with the author’s reasoning in the change note, scores as well as one that was adopted. What does not score is a critique so general the recipient could not have acted on it either way.

Reciprocity and conduct carries 25. Across four critique weeks you both give and receive. Critique the work, name the decision, and remember that the person reading it has their own materials on a wall two metres away.

Privacy#

Critiques you received are yours and are never circulated. Critiques you gave are read by your marker and by the recipient who countersigned them, and by nobody else. The full rule is on the policies page.

Feeds into: A4 — Applications in the Wild.