Students at BU, when asked recently, have voiced their wishes for clearer expectations about assignments and for clearer feedback.

One of the tools that can be used to enhance feedback is the BU Generic Assessment Criteria, revised in 2021. This recent version places more emphasis on skills such as team-working, group work/project work, self-management of learning and numerical/technical skills, with the revisions more closely aligned to the wide range of programmes at BU, especially those involving designing and making, and emphasise graduate/undergraduate skills that contribute to employability. The inclusion of feedforward as well as feedback statements is designed to help students recognise how they might improve the work and their grades

How might you use them?

For ease of use the Generic Assessment Criteria are pre-loaded into the units in Brightspace, visible to students and the teaching team, and an electronic rubric based on them has been developed that can be added when marking in Turnitin. Do ask your Faculty Learning Technologist for support with this if you run into problems when trying to add it.

Introducing students to the Criteria may help them to anticipate the qualities expected of an assignment in the different grade bands for the programme level they are studying at. Students can be encouraged to read them and to judge their draft work against the criteria.

If the rubric is attached and used when marking it provides detailed automated feedback and feedforward statements when you select the mark band across 4 headings.  This frees up time to provide individualised comments about the work submitted. Using the common language in the Criteria (good for 2.2, very good for 2.1 etc) enables the comments to align with the mark awarded.

If programme teams would like to contextualise the Generic Assessment Criteria for their particular programme/discipline/profession please do get in touch and I’ll be happy to work with you.

Anne Quinney,

Principal Lecturer, FLIE.