Flawed Feedback: The Problem with Peer Reviews

I am a huge fan of peer reviews - as one of many of inputs into the evaluator's final assessment.

I have worked in MANY positions where my supervisor had far less interaction with me than my peers did. A couple where my rater was NOT my supervisor. And one fun OER where my rater gave me an "average" rating because he didn't "have a chance" to evaluate my leadership - despite every one of my peers attesting that I was the reason our class was successful and that I was the best leader in the class.

In one situation I had literally never met my reviewer - and never did.

Peer reviews also give the evaluator a chance to see how the individual performs when "the boss" is out. It can uncover "spotlight rangers" as well as the folks who perform far better when out of the spotlight.

Should peer reviews be taken as gospel? No. Should they outweigh ANYTHING that the evaluator has personally assessed? No. But can they be used for context or to explain possible inconsistencies in the evaluator's own observations? Absolutely.

I was in a situation where 9 of us had to peer evaluate each other. There was one of us who was a wunderkind. I ranked him above me.

When it came time for my senior to evaluate me he told me that I was ranked as number 2 or 3 by all of my peers. And prior to reading peer evals, my senior thought I was 2 of 9. But he was concerned that I lacked confidence, as evidenced by my failure to rank myself as number 1 of 9 which everyone else did,). As a result, he ended up ranking me 4 of nine.

Peer evals are as big a nonsense as there is. They are the equivalent of the interview question "what's your biggest weakness? Everyone has a BS crafted response to that question.