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TRANSCRIPT: When you receive feedback on an assignment, it can often feel difficult to apply. Assessment documentation like assessment briefs, grading rubrics, and grade descriptors can help you here.
An assessment brief is a set of instructions that outlines what an assignment should include, and how it will be assessed. A rubric is a scoring guide that describes different levels of performance for an assignment against specific criteria. Grade descriptors do something similar to rubrics, but they tend to be more general, and may apply across multiple assignments or even whole courses.
These kinds of documents are often provided before you begin an assignment, but sometimes they’re used as a form of feedback itself: for example, assessors might show you directly how your work aligns with the rubric or grade descriptors, by highlighting rows or ticking boxes. You might initially find this form of feedback a bit impersonal, but it can still be an important and structured way of showing exactly how your work has been judged. In these cases, it’s up to you to interpret what needs to change, such as by looking at the next-highest rubric description and thinking about how you could reach that standard next time.
Even when these documents aren’t explicitly referred to in your feedback, they’re still valuable for making sense of it. After receiving feedback, it can be tempting to focus only on what the assessor has written. But comparing your feedback to your assessment documentation can reveal far more. For example, if you’re told to “add more detail,” the rubric could help you to clarify what the key features of “detailed” work might be at different grade levels.
Similarly, when your feedback feels minimal or generic, the rubric or grade descriptors can fill in the gaps. Try mapping your performance against these resources: which descriptions seem to best match your work? Where does your feedback suggest a mismatch between your work and the higher-grade descriptions? In a similar way, assessment briefs are still valuable after completing an assignment, too, because they can help you spot if you missed part of the task, or misunderstood the expectations. Revisiting them can sometimes clarify what your feedback is really pointing to.
In short, assessment documentation can give you a way to decode feedback and figure out what to do next by understanding the standards your work is being judged against.
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