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.

Bastian Tenbergen is an Associate Professor of Software Engineering at the State University of New York at Oswego (USA). His research is concerned with conceptual modeling, context engineering, requirements engineering, and safety engineering of software-intensive autonomous safety-critical systems as well as software engineering education. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Cognitive Science from the University of Osnabrück (Germany), a Master of Arts in Human Computer Interaction from SUNY Oswego (USA), and a PhD in Software Engineering from the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany). Dr. Tenbergen has over 15 years of research experience and has been involved with several publicly funded research projects with industry cooperation. He has contributed to several books and is (co-) author of numerous peer-reviewed articles in his field. Dr. Tenbergen serves on the programming and editorial boards of several top-ranked journals and conferences. He has co-organized many professional events, conferences, and workshops. He can be reached at bastian.tenbergen@oswego.edu.