The named and the unsung heroes of peer evaluations

Again I'd like to express my thanks both to Khan Academy, which creates the basis for the CS community here, and to the peer evaluators!  I find it moving and motivating that so many people put in an extra mile for their peers.

This really means a lot to the students  who have no coach to lift their projects from the queue, and who always have to wait for their turn.

Last week the CS peer evaluation queue was filling up with 3 year old evaluations. This usually happens when an account that has been used to make peer evaluations is deleted. Normally the peer evaluators manage to deal with it fairly quickly. However, if a school or school district mass deletes several classes, things can look very different They did. And we had not received notifications with requests to do peer evaluations either. Long story short: ticket to help desk, contact with Pamela who immediately started working on a fix for the peer notifications, but (wisely) no deploy since it was Friday already.  Drum roll: The community to the rescue!

On Friday I reached out to a number of students explaining the situation,asking them to spread the word, and promised everyone who chipped in with at least 20 evaluations during the week-end to be named in a thank you note in the Help center. Many wanted to help, but did not have to do quite as much - 20 projects being a significant amount of work. Undoubtedly many who did not receive any message from my network, discovered the situation on their own and decided to put in extra work to help clear the queue.

During a normal day at this time of the year, peer evaluators handle about 500 evaluations on Khan Academy. My estimate, based on how much the "normal" waiting time grew before we started eating into it again, was that the peer evaluators handled about three days worth of extra projects, or 1500 more evaluations than usual late last week, and mainly during the week'end. Most likely somewhere between 2000 and 3000 older projects were dumped on the queue - we still haven't quite caught up with everything.

Here are the nicknames of (some of) the heroes who did at least 20 projects between Friday and Monday morning:

• avmswimmer
• BB-8
• element118
• Evan Lewis
• Larry S
• Shadow
• Tazal
• Weather 

Together we took care of 393 projects, or 26% of those 1500. Obviously, that means 74% were done by so far unsung heroes. Some of them may deserving a mention.If there are others out there who did evaluate at least 20 projects between Friday and Monday morning: leave a link to your discussion profile so I can check it and put you on the list. It does not matter if you got my message or not - you've done your best for the KA community, and if you did it without being asked that's even better :-)

Imagine the effect of seeing a mass of 3y old projects on students who have just delivered their own! If you did some, but less than the necessary 20 to go on the list, you've still been part of an awesome movement helping others learn. Be proud of it! 

Edited 09.11.2018 to add Tazal's contribution.