Peer Review Process

You are reviewing your fellow student's paper in order to help him/her
improve it.  There are three levels of working on a paper:
* revising,
* editing, and
* proofreading.
Revising is about the main ideas (or any missing ideas).  Editing
is about cleaning up sentences here and there.  Proofreading is
about misspellings, incorrect figure references, etc.  Do you see
any analogies with strategic, tactical, and operational decisions?

At the peer-review stage, help your fellow student in _revising_.
Look for good ideas that should be emphasized.  Try to think of
experiments that didn't get done that should get done.  Look for
mathematical mistakes.

This isn't to say that grammar and spelling are unimportant.  Indeed,
each student is responsible for his/her own grammar and spelling.  It's
just that we're putting off that kind of editing until after the main
ideas are in place.

So, here are your duties as a peer reviewer:
0. Read the paper.  Try to not communicate with the author other than
by reading the paper.
1. Highlight any paragraphs that confused you as a reader.
2. Imagine how to improve it by adding further analyses,
experiments, etc. and write those ideas down.
3. Also note down any explanations that were missing that
would've helped you understand things better.
4. Write down any mathematical mistakes you noticed.
5. Write a short (50-word) and medium (200-word) abstract for
the paper.  
6. Fill out the grading rubric as if you were the professor giving
the paper a grade.  This is a good quantitative way to show the
paper's author where the paper needs to be improved.

Some thoughts about filling out the grading rubric:
* The scores you enter _will not_ affect the author's grade in the
course.
* Your fellow students are depending on your honest (but diplomatic)
feedback.  Giving top marks in each category to help someone feel happy
and/or like you will backfire in the long run if they actually needed to
be warned about something.
* It's possible that your score for doing peer review will depend on how
the marks you give correspond to the ones your professor gives.

Reminder on abstracts:
An abstract is a concise summary of the whole paper, not just the intro or
just the conclusions, and is understandable without reference to the rest 
of the paper. It should contain no citation to other published work.  
It should contain little or no math notation.  It should include key words
that someone might be searching for using Google, etc. (but no need to 
repeat what's already in the title).