On more than one occasion student absences and student lack of preparedness sewed minor chaos in my classrooms. The real problem of the two was lack of preparedness–an insufficient number of drafts for peer review—exacerbated by absences. If six students show up with two hard copies of an essay, five students show up with one hard copy of an essay, three students show up with only a digital copy of an essay, and only three students show up the proper three copies of an essay while five students don’t show up at all, how much peer review time is lost trying to manage the disparities and allocate papers?
What you might expect from this was born out over the course of the semester.
Students absent on peer review day fared most poorly grade-wise because they had zero peer review. From there, students who distributed fewer papers among their peers for review garnered weaker grades than those who distributed more or all.
It’s not rocket science but a rocket scientist might be required to conceive of a method to get students to consistently show up prepared for peer review days.