I want to preface this by saying I absolutely do not envy university staff at all, I'm sure their workload is way bigger than many of us give it credit for and they try their best to help us succeed with whatever gets thrown at us, but I really can't help but feel that assessment feedback is unbelievably poor if not unacceptable.
My recent marks have been 62 and 65, which I'm not very proud of as I hold myself to a very high standard, but with 62 being such a low mark you would imagine there would be plenty of suggestions for improvements and feedback in the comments, right?
Virtually nothing. Single word responses usually ranging from "good" to "interesting" and about 2 critical comments in total, one of which criticised a section of my abstract in which I go into detail on my initial thoughts and feelings when approaching the project we were doing throughout the year. We were told to do this at the start of the module and that it would be an essential part of our abstract, yet the comment says it isn't relevant. The only other critique simply says "go into more detail" which isn't useful nor does it highlight any of the issues with that part of the assessment. So after losing out on 38 marks, the only suggestions for improvement I have are to remove a section of my assessment which I was literally told to include, and to go into more detail on one specific paragraph, whatever that's supposed to mean.
This has been a reccuring theme for many of my assessments, both from first year and this year, and I can't help but get increasingly frustrated with how unhelpful these comments tend to be. I understand that I can get in touch with the person who marked my work to ask them to elaborate on what I could improve, but I feel like that shouldn't be necessary when the entire point of marking the assessment is to provide feedback. This combined with the continuous strikes (a very necessary thing, but frustrating for students who spend absurd amounts of money on their studies) has just left me feeling disappointed with my second year.
Perhaps I'm overexaggerating the issue since I'm upset with my marks, which ultimately is my fault more than anything else, but even after the feeling of disappointment has passed I still feel like assessment feedback is lackluster at best and provides very little for me to consider when approaching my assessments next year.