uea.su Student comments in this year’s NSS survey endorse these figures, with students from a variety of schools highlighting poor quality of feedback: “Even though there is a standard senate scale for making, it feels that the markers are often marking on their opinion and rarely give constructive feedback. More often than not, the essays I receive back have got no annotations so it is impossible to see how to improve or what my strengths are.” AMA Student, NSS 2017 “Feedback/justification for mark often missing or unhelpful.” BIO Student, NSS 2017 “Some marking and feedback has not been explained and has not been considered completely fair.” CHE Student, NSS 2017 “… feedback has been limited and not what I would have expected.” EDU Student, NSS 2017 “Assessments need to be better explained and feedback needs to be more thorough so it is easier to build upon it.” HSC Student, NSS 2017 “Poor feedback when it comes to written feedback such as portfolio/SSS feedback. For example, my most recent feedback was written in board mark and said ’good work’… In contrast, my intercalation year at Southampton University… provided feedback that filled many A4 sheets for each and every bit of coursework.” MED Student, NSS 2017 “Sometimes, marks are deducted without any indication as to why or where they were lost. There are no useful comments to help students to improve” MTH Student, NSS 2017 “Often find coursework feedback sheets are minimal. Several essays have been handed back with no notes/feedback at all, just the grade boundaries I fall in to.” PSY Student, NSS 2017 Despite warning from academics, as highlighted by the quotes from October’s LTC on page 38, it appears that UEA have not accounted for the extra work that goes into providing a consistent quality of feedback whilst improving timeliness. Although satisfaction with quality of feedback is not as low as that of timeliness was before UEA prioritised it, uea(su) fears that if the amount of resource available to staff continues to be the same then satisfaction with quality of feedback will continue to decrease.
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student experience report