Peer Review made Easy

We regret that the Aropä peer review system ceased being available for general use from July 2024.

Aropä is a web-based system supporting student peer review activities, whereby students comment on each others' work.

Aropä has been available, free of charge, to institutions across the world since January 2010, supporting over 76,000 students in developing their writing and critical review skills. It has helped more than 300 instructors in almost 60 institutions facilitate the peer-review process in over 3350 assignments (approximately five assignments per week). It has supported instructors with such issues as randomisation, group submissions, labelled submissions, review marking and flexible rubric creation as well as providing a range of administrative features including extensions, outlier elimination and report creation.

Aropä supported peer review in classes in a wide range of subject areas, from Accounting to Anthropology, Marine Biology to Media Studies, Pharmachology to Politics and even Veterinary Science and Zoology.

Aropä was provided on a wholly voluntary basis by two academics who understand both instructor and student needs, and who have a strong commitment to developing students’ critical analysis and reflective skills.

The University of Glasgow School of Computing Science generously hosted the Aropä system since 2010. We are very grateful to the technical staff who made this possible. Aropä is still hosted at The University of Auckland, where it is available to University of Auckland academics only.

The code is open source.

The Aropä Summary document (May 2018) gives more detailed information about the system's design and use, as well as comments and testimonials from users.

We have two publications and a technical report summarising our experiences with Aropä:

Other publications on Aropä include:

  • Helen Purchase and John Hamer. Aropä: peer review made easy. e-learning Excellence Awards: An Anthology of Case Histories. Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited, pp.173-184. ISBN 9781911218166, October 2016.
  • John Hamer, Helen Purchase, Andrew Luxton-Reilly & Paul Denny. A comparison of peer and tutor feedback. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, March 2014.

The earliest publication, which introduced the system, was:

  • John Hamer, Catherine Kell and Fiona Spence. Peer assessment using Aropä ACE'07 Proceedings of the ninth Australasian Conference on Computing Education, 66:43-54, January 2007.

Several instructors have published articles or given presentations on their use of Aropä: