MyChances.net

We’ve been running the free essay editing and feedback system on MyChances.net for over a year, and over the holiday we decided it was time to make improvements based on lessons we have learned.

When will my essay be rated?

This is probably the #1 question that people would ask about the essay rating system. The problem was, it was really hard to answer. Nobody could choose which essay to read – we assigned it to them – which should have meant it was easy to know when an essay would get rated. If we had assigned essays in order of submission, the answer indeed would have been pretty obvious. But we didn’t do that. We wanted to reward people who contributed often to the site. Therefore, we assigned essays in the order of the # of credits that their author had.

Let’s say that the queue had one person’s essay, and this person was a pretty regular contributor, having 25 credits. His essay has been rated 4 times already, needing just one more to be completed. All of a sudden, I decide to submit an essay. Since I have 2,500 credits, my essay now takes precedence over his. So despite being 80% complete, he will have to wait for my essay to become 100% complete before he can get that last rating.

As a consequence, it became almost impossible to see how long it would take before one’s essay would get rated. It was dependent on stochastic processes.

Let the market decide

We wanted our authors to be able to get a sense of when their essay would be rated, while still rewarding those who contributed to the site. Therefore, we decided to allow the authors to offer as many or as few credits as they wanted, and to choose how many reviews they wanted to receive. The raters, in turn, would be able to see a list of all available essays, and how many credits were being offered for each one.

In this way, the authors could help determine how soon their essay would get rated. If they wanted a quick rating, for example, they could submit an essay for just 2 reviews at 15 credits a pop, jumping to the top of the list and getting done more quickly.

The title is the thing

Now that our raters could select one essay among many, things started to look pretty boring with names like “Untitled 1852″. Sure, perhaps you could select essays based on how many credits they pay (I sure do), or based on how many reviews are left to complete, or even based on some sort of credit-per-character metric. But in the end, I wanted to know if I would be evaluating an essay that looked interesting to me. So I created a new, publicly visible title field. Now I just might choose to evaluate “On leadership and lollipops” at 5 credits over “Untitled 2858″ at 10.

Note: ‘publicly visible title’ means that the title is world-viewable, including to non-members and search engines, until the essay has received its final rating. At that point, the title becomes completely hidden. The essay itself, of course, is always totally hidden from public view, which brings me to…

Privacy is still king

Every step of the way during the system redesign, I asked myself, “Would I use this if I were a college applicant?” For me, the only way that the answer would ever be “yes” is if I felt that my privacy were adequately protected. Many students are interested in getting feedback, and almost all are concerned about privacy. They don’t want their essays showing up in search results, or becoming easy fodder for copy-and-paste plagiarism.

Essays are still never shown to guests. And, while most members can now provide feedback on any active essay that they choose, they still must complete their rating of each essay they select before they can even view another. There are also limits in place on the number of essays that any particular member can view in one day.

Whither?

To where from here? We need to allow people to evaluate the quality of essay feedback that they receive. More details once that is implemented.

As always, if you have concerns, complaints, or suggestions for improvement, please post them here. Thanks to all of the members who *are* essay reviewers and essay authors. I am consistently impressed both with the essays that get submitted, and with the insightful, sincere feedback. Keep it up!