Free write - peer review

With my past experiences with peer reviews they have never been very helpful. I think this is because many times we just hand it off to our friends and they don't want to be harsh of negative. Also people, myself included, can get lazy when doing a peer review and not take it too seriously. Sometimes harsh or negative feedback can be the most helpful, but most of the time when I get a peer review back it simply just says something along the lines of "good job!" or "I really like where this is going!" Peer reviews seem to me artificial in my opinion and reviews done by an instructor are usually much more beneficial. I think that an effective peer review would be a very honest statement on what they project looks like so far. It is directly related towards the grading rubric to help set guidelines on what needs to be done right.