For a Sensitivity in Assessment Feedback

By Precious Akponah, Hela Hassen, Matthew Higgins

A death threat, dispatched via email from an undergraduate student to their tutor, prompted a visit from the police to campus. The sender of the email was unhappy with their mark, and appreciating that the regulatory bureaucratic processes of the university would not deliver the outcome sought, they then resorted to other methods. 

Disgruntled students seeking redress for assessed work they feel has not been marked to their satisfaction is a common experience for most tutors. We have all probably been subject to the ire and pleading that follows the release of marks for assessed work. Thankfully, threats to life and limb are rare. However, these instances do encourage you to reflect on the significance placed on assessment by teaching staff, administrators, and students.

We suggest context is key here. Business schools, especially in the UK, navigate an ill-defined path between social science academic respectability, and a training school for tomorrow’s entrepreneurs and C-suite executives. Business schools are designed to be relatively low-cost operators with high income generating capacity. This model of business education financially flourishes when large swathes of students descend each year, each buying into the aspirational premise that gilds these degrees.

With the complementary and competing goals of institutions, teaching staff and students, assessment feedback can be a valuable site of learning, but equally, as we have seen, it can be a site of dispute and conflict. The aims and expectations we set, and the processes through which assessment feedback is managed, are of crucial importance to shape what transpires. Accordingly, the demands of performance measures, both individual and institution, need to be balanced with the ethics of assessment. The nature of these ethics tends to crystallize when the learning dynamics within the relationship between tutor and student are allowed to be exposed.

Read the TLI article here.