Real-time Peer Feedback

Intro

Peer review assignments allow students to provide comments on their classmates' submitted essays. This fosters collaboration, critical thinking, and reflection by encouraging students to learn from one another's work.

Beyond in-document comments, students can also give feedback directly on the assignment's rubric — selecting a level for each criterion and adding a written comment. The author then sees peer feedback, instructor feedback, AI feedback, and the plain rubric together in one panel.

Peer Review Types

Rumi offers two types of peer review assignments:

No Peer-Review – Students only see their own work. (Default.)

Class-wide Peer Review – Everyone in the class can review any other peer from the class.

Selective Peer Review – Instructors have full control over who reviews whom, with the option to automatically or manually assign or adjust reviewer pairings.

Who sees what: Document comments are visible to all peers. Rubric feedback is visible only to the instructor and the document's author — reviewers cannot see each other's rubric ratings or rubric comments.

Instructor Experience - Choose a peer review type

Instructor Setup

Class-wide Peer Review

To enable class-wide peer review, select the Class-wide Peer Review option within the Rumi Dashboard when creating an assignment. This enables peer-to-peer feedback for your assignment. Students can view all submitted essays.

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Selective Peer Review

To set up selective peer review:

Step 1. Select Selective Peer Review as the peer review type and click Assign Reviewers.

Instructor Experience - Enabling selective peer review via the Rumi dashboard and assign reviewers

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Step 2. In the Assign peer reviewers window, decide which students are eligible to be paired:

Only students who submitted – Turn this on to limit the list to students who have already submitted their essay. This prevents you from assigning reviewers to an essay that doesn't exist yet, and keeps students who haven't submitted out of the review round.
Remove unenrolled – Clears any assignments involving students who are no longer enrolled in the class.

Instructor Experience - Choose who is eligible to be paired

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Step 3. To automatically assign reviewers, set the number of reviewers you want per student in the Assign __ reviewers per student field and click Auto-assign. The system will randomly assign that many peer reviewers to each student.

Use Clear all at any time to reset every assignment and start over.

Instructor Experience - Automatically assign reviewers to each student paper

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Step 4. If needed, you can manually adjust the assignments by clicking + Add in the Reviewed By column to search for and add a specific student as a reviewer, removing a reviewer by clicking the X button on their name chip, or using the Search students box to jump to a particular student.

Instructor Experience - Manually modify or assign peer reviewers

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Step 5. Use the reviewer-count filters — All, None, 1, 2, 3+ — to check your coverage before saving. This is the fastest way to spot a student whose essay has no reviewer assigned, or one who has fewer or more reviewers than the rest of the class.

Instructor Experience - Check reviewer coverage before saving

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Step 6. Once you are satisfied with the assignments, click Save assignments to save your selections.

Instructor Experience - Save Assigned Peer Reviewers

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Step 7. You will be redirected to the settings page, where a confirmation message will appear to indicate that assignments were saved successfully. An Assigned chip will also appear next to the Assign Reviewers button confirming that reviewers have been successfully assigned.

Instructor Experience - Assigned reviewers are saved

Setting a peer review window (optional)

You can limit peer review to a specific time range. Under the peer review type, set a Start date, after which reviewers can view and comment on peer essays, and a Due date, after which they can no longer add feedback.

Both fields are optional, and you can set one without the other. With neither set, peer review is open indefinitely. With only a start date, it opens on that date and stays open. With only a due date, it opens immediately and closes on that date. With both, it is open only between the two. An unset field simply means "no limit on that end" — peer review does not close on its own unless you give it a due date.

The window applies to both class-wide and selective peer review.

Instructor Experience - Set the peer review window

Releasing peer feedback and notifying students

Two settings control when students see the feedback written about them, and whether they're emailed about it. These work the same way as the equivalent settings for rubric feedback and instructor comments.

Manual release, when on, holds all peer comments, annotations, and rubric feedback until you release them; when off, students see peer feedback live as it's written. Email notifications, when on, sends students an email alert when new peer-review comments are added to their document.

Turning Manual release on is useful when you want every reviewer to form an independent opinion — nobody can see what others wrote before submitting their own feedback, and you can review the batch before it reaches the author.

Instructor Experience - Release peer feedback and notify students