It’s still marking season. Every semester, around this time, I write the same thing over and over and over.

It is very, very challenging to write feedback, not knowing whether this small, seemingly innocuous, comment may be the final straw that destroys someone’s self-concept as a scholar and is catalyst for them to drop out of uni… or whether they are the type of student who did not care about trying when they did the assessment and still really does not care enough at the end of semester to even read my often carefully-considered (although too brief) feedback.

I tend to err on the side of being very direct. I find praise sandwiches a bit patronising… maybe because I feel like I am being too obvious when I do it, and think I will come off as insincere if I try. It can be difficult, though, to be usefully direct.

Sorry about lack of referencing here, but I read a couple of years ago that experts want to be corrected, while novices want to know what they did right.

So, if you are trying to shoot a basket and are very experienced, what you want from your coach is to know how to improve, where you are going wrong, a “critical friend”. If you are just starting out, you may need confirmation that you are holding the ball right and that the way you are pushing up with your arm is the same as you have been shown. In other words, you do not have enough background to know what you are doing right. If you are an expert, you can see when you are doing right, but want hints on how to improve and stop doing wrong things.

The problem happens when the expert comes across a novice and thinks they must want the same kind of feedback that works for them… so points out all kinds of errors, leaving the novice, who is none-the-wiser about what they are actually doing right, feeling like they are doing only wrong things.

I think that this may be the biggest mismatch between markers and students when it comes to feedback.

I am experimenting this semester with listing in my comments a whole lot of possible right things that students can do for this assessment, then asterisking those bits that this student had issues with. It makes the feedback wordy, but maybe is giving them context for the bits where they can improve??

Regardless, here are three phrases that I write over and over and over and over…..

“Please synthesise and summarise.”

“Favour succinctness.”

“This source is not recent enough to support this claim about current technology.”

And one that I write too often each semester….even if it is just once or twice.

“I suspect this mark indicates more about your time management on this assessment than your academic capability. If this is not so, then please contact me and we can discuss together improvements that you could make for next time”.