Kritik

What Kritik is

Kritik is a peer assessment and AI transparency platform for instructors and their institutions, made by Kritik Education, whose site footer places it in Toronto, Ontario. It is not a course builder or a marketplace: it plugs into the LMS a course already runs on and handles assignments where students evaluate each other's work, along with tools that record how students used AI while writing or coding. The home page says it serves over 200,000 users across 250+ institutions. The product comes in two main parts, Kritik360 for peer-led assessment and 360° feedback, and VisibleAI for authorship and AI transparency. Together they make up what Kritik calls the Kritik Toolkit, which adds both to an existing LMS. A third module, Coding Authorship, applies the same process view to programming assignments.

Peer assessment with Kritik360

In Kritik360 students submit work, then evaluate classmates' submissions anonymously against a rubric the instructor sets. The step after that is what the product is built around: students rate the feedback they receive, a feature Kritik calls Feedback on Feedback, so the quality of a critique is judged as well as the work itself.

Each student builds a grading power score on a 6-star rating system over the semester. Better evaluations raise it, and so does doing more of them. Instructors can calibrate the class by evaluating submissions first, which sets a benchmark that pulls every student's grading power close to the instructor's, and grading power keeps re-calibrating as students complete more evaluations. Kritik says this leads to fewer grading disputes, because students can trust the scores they get from peers. A University of Calgary student quoted on the site described how it played out: "The outlier grades/lower grades received from the peers were weighted less while the grades received from the other peers were weighted more."

Instructors can spotlight strong submissions and evaluations so the class sees what good feedback looks like, and can recognize evaluations as Innovative or Above & Beyond. Beyond written assignments, the platform lists group and team assessment with visibility into each member's contribution, live presentations with real-time peer scoring, and oral assessments for demonstrating practical skills. A dispute resolution feature is meant to cut appeals by putting clear evidence in front of everyone, and an analytics and export area provides outcome data on demand.

VisibleAI and coding authorship

VisibleAI handles generative AI by recording the process rather than trying to detect machine-written text after the fact; the site's menu sums up the Kritik Loop as "Why process beats detection". Authorship insights give keystroke-level provenance, AI prompt records keep every prompt, edit and source, and instructors set an AI policy per assignment rather than one blanket rule for the course. The home page describes the result as "detailed insights into AI-generated content, student edits, and prompts". Transparent coding assessment carries the same idea into programming courses: students write, run and improve code with AI while their process stays visible to the instructor.

On the instructor side, AI-powered assessment design creates assignments and rubrics from a syllabus and existing materials, which the site groups under reducing workload. VisibleAI can also be tried through a pilot, which the footer offers next to the usual demo booking.

Several testimonials on the site come from PLNU education faculty using VisibleAI. One program director wrote: "As a university, we were unsure about how to incorporate AI into our curriculum. But VisibleAI has provided a safe and transparent way for my students to explore the power of generative AI tools." Another said it helped her students find strategies and lesson plan ideas for supporting the multilingual learners in their own classrooms.

Setting it up in a course

Kritik connects to an institution's LMS through LTI 1.3, and its menu names Canvas, D2L, Blackboard and Moodle. Course rosters and grades sync between Kritik and the LMS, so students and instructors stay in the system they already use. The home page lists single sign-on, FERPA compliance and WCAG 2.1 accessibility, and the menu points to a VPAT and to data isolation and encryption under security and privacy.

Support comes in three forms. One-on-one onboarding with an in-house onboarding specialist helps set up the course and rubrics. Office hours give instructors support from a Kritik instructional designer for course, rubric and assignment setup throughout the semester. And 24/7 live chat is open to students as well as instructors, which matters when a whole class is working to the same peer review deadline. The resource library adds an AI policy toolkit, a rubric library sorted by discipline, activity templates built by educators, teaching tips, pedagogy guides, live and on-demand webinars, and partner case studies, plus an educator community.

What the site reports

Kritik publishes student feedback figures without stating how many students answered or when: 75% said their communication skills improved, 100% said Kritik helped them learn the course content better, 90% said it improved their critical thinking skills, 85% said they learned by evaluating peers' work, 81% said peer grades were similar to what their instructor would have given, and 79% said it was a valuable addition their institution should purchase. Instructor testimonials come from faculty at the University of Waterloo, the University of Calgary, the University at Buffalo, Louisiana Tech, Michigan State, the University of Missouri and Boston University, in subjects ranging from chemistry and music to finance, data science, psychology, nutrition and anatomy. A Buffalo data science professor noted that customized rubrics helped students catch "smaller but important points", and a Waterloo chemistry lecturer wrote that peer evaluation "encourages students to think about what they are doing".

Kritik's home page gives no prices. The menu points to a Plans & Pricing section under the line "Find the right fit for your course", and visitors can start through a "Try it now" link or book a demo. One Michigan State psychology professor's testimonial touches on cost, saying "the students feel the value they receive from Kritik is worth far more than the price they pay."

Who it suits

Kritik suits instructors who want students to learn by critiquing each other: writing-heavy courses, large classes where an instructor cannot comment on every draft, team projects where contribution is hard to see, and courses built around presentations or oral work. The calibration and grading power system answers the usual worry about peer grading, that one careless reviewer drags a mark down. Institutions working out an AI policy will find VisibleAI's per-assignment rules and prompt records a practical way to allow AI use while keeping it visible, and computing departments get the same view of coding work. It is less of a fit for anyone who needs to deliver proctored exams or build and sell a course, since it is an assessment layer on top of an LMS rather than either of those. Peer assessment also asks real effort of students, and calibration works best when the instructor grades a few submissions first.