Feedback code of practice

Simon Green
University of Leeds

We have a code of practice for assessment and a section in it is about feedback. We do really basic things like making sure that formative messages are not buried within summative messages. We try to make it absolutely explicit what needs to be done to improve next time, and also to show how it needs to be done.  So now it’s something that colleagues are certainly aware of, at a reasonably deep level, and they are aware of why they need to be doing this.

The other thing is recognizing that feedback doesn’t happen in a vacuum. How accessible feedback will be to students will depend to a great extent on what they’ve had before they actually start writing their assignment, such as spending time in modules trying to clarify what is actually required, for example, the standards by which a piece of work will be assessed.

The comments on draft work are also really important. If expertise is about understanding quality, being able to judge your own work in terms of quality standards, and about developing a repertoire of strategies for improving, then feedback on drafts and finished assignments, needs to be relevant to that. How consistently colleagues do these things varies. Over the years, we made it into quite a big issue.

We offer all our students opportunities to submit draft work. So for every assignment, if we’ve got 25 assignments to mark, we will already have looked at roughly 25 drafts. The feedback that we give is copious, we have a well-developed system for distinguishing summative comments from formative comments, and we invest a lot of time in making formative comments useful. 

Students like it, but that doesn’t stop them asking for more. A recurrent theme in module feedback is that students welcome the feedback they get on drafts but some students say they would be grateful if tutors could mark their drafts. So, you know, in fact, what they actually want is not just draft feedback, but really a trial marking process which is not remotely within our current workload allocations. But students definitely do appreciate and comment on the quality of our feedback.