Sphinx

I’ve been having flashbacks to that time in my previous outfit when I was sent to have a word (with extreme prejudice) with a Faculty Education Director who’d stopped answering emails. Professor Kurtz was a fine academic manager, combining military efficiency with a broad background in the Humanities, the Arts and Sciences. He viewed his career as the dedication of his talents to bringing our values and way of life to those darker, less fortunate people – students. He’d been sent out to survey student ideas about feedback and assessment, after rumours of NSS discontent had reached senior management.

“Your mission makes about as much sense as those idiots who sent you on it,” he snarled at me, his face lit up with the blue light of the online submission system. “Asshole! Schmuck! How long does it take you to figure out that nobody knows what they’re doing here. Except me. Students don’t really care about feedback, just marks. Let’s just give it to them, quick and nasty. It’s all meaningless, arbitrary chaos anyway. You’re not an educator, Morley. You’re a tick-box checker, trained by cynics, running endlessly round their hamster wheel until you drop…”

No, I don’t know why this is the image that came to mind – especially as I was actually the one who carried out that survey, and had to deal with the finding that a substantial majority of students who responded considered that the primary if not the only function of feedback was to explain why they didn’t get a better mark… The reason I’m thinking about this topic at all this week (student exercises not due until next week…) is the mention by a friend on Facebook that a certain university – I’m not sure how official or confidential this is, so I’m not going to name it – is planning to deal with poor NSS scores on feedback, especially on its promptness, by bringing in an external provider to deliver immediate generic feedback on student work.

I mean, what? How can that possibly work, unless they simply plan to run each submission through a spellchecker and comment on the grammar? Even generic feedback, of the “you need to have a much stronger structure and better sign-posting” variety, surely depends on specialist evaluation of the exercise. The only way I can imagine this working is if the academics are required to produce detailed marking plans for each question, listing the key points that need to be included, that can then be farmed out to poorly-paid tickbox monkeys. And of course the reason we don’t generally mark like that in the humanities is that university-level study is supposed to go well beyond the “here are the 20 Key Facts you need to include for this topic” approach. So obviously current practices will need to change to accommodate the new system…

It’s clearly true that many of our students have expectations of the speed with which their work ought to be returned that are completely incompatible with our norms of two to three weeks, presumably because of the way they’re used to things happening at school. To which the obvious responses are (a) poor bloody school teachers, (b) how far does this depend on (i) smaller classes than e.g. my 160-odd Greek History course and (ii) much shorter exercises than 3,000-word essays, and (c) much lower expectations of what the feedback will consist of. Our basic explanation for needing two to three weeks, besides sheer lack of time, is that we are evaluating longer, more complex and varied pieces of work in more depth and detail, providing more or less extensive comments both on the intrinsic qualities and on how the student might improve in future exercises, and you can’t turn that around in a day or so..

But what if a significant number of students really don’t want that sort of lovingly crafted bespoke feedback, but just a mark and a few comments as quickly as possible? That seems counter-productive, from our perspective – how much use can you get from such minimal information? But it does make sense in a world where you need the quick feedback so you can modify your homework exercise the following week, and then over the course of the year, and scores of such exercises, gradually modify your approach on the basis of what seems to do better in terms of marks, even if the written comments are in some cases quite limited. Thinking back, that’s certainly how it was for me.

Now of course university is not that world; indeed, it’s a world where the message from senior management has regularly been that we assess too much. We provide such detailed and copious feedback because assessment exercises are relatively rare, and hence individually quite important for overall results, and so students need lots of advice on how to maximise their performance without being able to follow the incremental, trial and error approach they’ve been used to following. And assessment exercises are relatively rare at least in part because we provide such feedback and so the whole enterprise is time-consuming. And, while our goal is to adjust student expectations about how to think about assessment so they fit with our approach, one feels less than sanguine about the prospects if management decide that the path of least resistance is to adjust out approach to match student expectations. From outsourcing feedback on the basis (presumably) of limited mark schemes, in order to accelerate speed of return of (rubbish) feedback, to the expectation that because assessment is now much quicker and more limited it should be happening much more often, is a relatively small step…

My best results from feedback, with almost total buy-in and enthusiasm from students, come in my final-year modules, where, following the practice of my colleague Rebecca Langlands, assessment comes in two stages: draft, on which they receive detailed feedback, and then revised version (worth a lot more marks). With, as I recall, just one exception – when the student responded to my feedback by submitting something completely new and different (and worse) for the second stage – every student has improved their marks as a result, in some cases to a dramatic degree. I don’t know how far it helps them also recognise the utility of feedback in other tasks; I would hope so.

And of course really I need to be doing this with first-year students, so they understand why feedback matters and learn how to make use of it at an early stage – but then we’re talking about 160 students rather than 12, and it is significantly more work than just marking a one-off essay. Reduce my teaching load so that this would be feasible, and I’ll do it; give me a decent number of teaching assistants, and I’ll train and monitor them; but in current circumstances…

Actually, I shouldn’t say this, but threaten to outsource the feedback process and I might do it anyway out of sheer bloody-minded fury.