A Tool to Facilitate Calibrated Peer Reviews in Software Engineering Education

In previous work, we have provided a substantive amount of evidence that shows that Calibrated Peer Reviews to facilitate a feeling of "quality" in software engineering students have a strongly positive impact on student learning. Peer reviews repeatedly expose students to examples of different quality and force students to articulate engineering tradeoffs. Using calibration examples of different quality guides students in their evaluation of peer solutions and fosters an appreciation between good and bad solutions to exercise problems in requirements engineering and testing. The result is a significant improvement in test scores and theory retention, however, the overhead for the instructor to facilitate the peer review process outweighs the time saved for grading. In this article, we introduce "CPRtool" to automate collection and distribution of student solutions and peer feedback.