Review, Revise, and Resubmit: The Effects of Self-Critique, Peer Review, and Instructor Feedback on Student Writing

These experiments examined the common practice of allowing students to revise and resubmit papers after receiving feedback. Blind graders evaluated students’ first and second drafts of an introduction in American Psychological Association (APA) format. Across experiments, just over 50% of students’ scores improved across drafts when evaluated by blind graders compared to over 80% improvement for the scores assigned by the graduate student lab instructors. In examining the effects of the source of feedback on first drafts, no difference between self-critique, peer review, and feedback from the lab instructor was found in blind graders’ scores. The results suggest that high scores obtained through the review–revise–resubmit procedure do not reflect good writing in an objective sense, but rather an ability to satisfy a particular reviewer.