Comparison
Marka vs Google Forms for peer evaluation
Google Forms is where most classroom peer evaluation still happens. It collects responses well. Everything after that — combining rows, protecting anonymity, spotting bad-faith scores, building the per-student table — is still manual. Here is what changes with a purpose-built tool.
| What you deal with | Google Forms + spreadsheet | Marka |
|---|---|---|
| Setup | Build a form by hand for every class and every period; copy it, re-key criteria, re-share the link. | Build a rubric once. Reuse it across every class and every evaluation period you run. |
| Student access | A shared link anyone can forward. Restricting to signed-in users means students need a Google account. | A personal 7-character access code per student. No account, no email, nothing to forward. |
| Anonymity | Depends on form settings and honour code. If you collect emails to stop duplicates, responses are no longer anonymous. | Anonymity is enforced server-side. A student sees the note content peers wrote, never who wrote it. |
| Small-sample protection | None. A "score" built from one classmate looks identical to one built from ten. | No score or public note reaches a student until at least 3 evaluators have submitted for them. |
| Comment moderation | None. Whatever a student types lands in the sheet and, if you forward it, in front of the evaluated student. | Public notes are reviewed before release. Likely profanity or very short answers are auto-flagged; bulk-approve the rest. |
| Results | One row per submission. You export, combine by hand, and build a pivot table to get one row per student. | One-button Consolidated Final Report: one row per student, per-criterion means, General Average, dashboard view and CSV together. |
| Integrity checks | You eyeball the sheet. Free-riding, grudge scoring, and friend-group inflation are easy to miss across 40 students. | The Peer Integrity Engine flags free-riders, straight-lining, collusion cliques, and rater bias for the teacher only. |
| Coverage tracking | You cross-reference two tabs to see who has not been evaluated yet. | A coverage view sorts students by evaluations received, not just given, so nobody is left with unusable results. |
| Cost | Free. | Free for up to 3 classes, 50 students per class and 6 evaluation periods. The Insights add-on removes the limits. |
When Google Forms is still the right call
If you run peer evaluation once a year, do not hand results back to students, and are comfortable in a spreadsheet, a Google Form is hard to beat on familiarity. Marka earns its place when you run evaluations every term, across several sections, and want the results to reach students safely without an afternoon of formulas each time.
Common questions
No. Google Forms collects responses; you still do the aggregation, the anonymity bookkeeping, and the pivot table. Marka does the collection and the aggregation, enforces anonymity and a minimum-evaluator rule server-side, and hands back a finished per-student report.
Yes. Rebuild the same criteria and scale once in Marka’s rubric builder and it carries across every class and period. You import your class list as a CSV, the same spreadsheet you already keep.
No. Students log in with a personal 7-character access code a teacher hands out. Marka never sends a student an email; the only email address in the system belongs to the teacher.
Every evaluation period is scanned for patterns worth a second look — free-riders, straight-lining, scoring cliques, rater bias — and surfaced to the teacher only, worded as "worth a look," never as an accusation. The teacher can exclude a specific rating with a reason; the original submission is never edited or deleted.
The Free plan is free with no time limit: rosters, rubrics, evaluation periods, results, and CSV export, for up to 3 classes, 50 students per class and 6 evaluation periods, with a blurred preview of the Final Report. The Insights add-on removes those limits and adds AI-assisted review.