Can someone (preferably a CV Expert) share with me why Peer Essay Reviewers only have 1 hour to complete their critique. After completing 50 reviews, I realized that some essays are way more complicated to evaluate. I found that about 10% of them really need some time to figure out the recommendations for improving the essay. I recently was reviewing one about a "tiny fork" and wow I had to read that about 5 times and take notes before I could come up with something meaningful and germane.
In the very first version, there was no time limit. After running it for a while, we have discovered that claiming an essay for review and then abandoning it was a very common behavior. Right now, looking at our metrics, I can see that an average essay gets claimed 1.5 times. This means that every other essay is claimed and then abandoned. Every other. One in two.
We're not sure why people do it exactly, my personal guess is that such people never mean to complete a review in the first place, but merely want to look at it as an example or inspiration for their own work. I could be wrong.
So it turns out that we need to protect the submitter of the essay from this happening, and do it in a straightforward, completely automated way, since there are too many occurrences to handle every single one manually. So we came up with the time limit.
Is one hour too short? Perhaps. But it's a balance: make the timeout period too long, and the abandonment behavior will start having a big effect on turnaround time. Make it too short, and some of the more thoughtful reviewers feel there is not enough time.
To keep this community safe and supportive: