How Well Am I Doing? Using a Corpus-based Analysis to Investigate Tutor and Institutional Messages in Comment Sheets

Current Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education guidelines highlight the necessity for institutional assessment to be clear and transparent. Whilst institutions spend much energy on making sure that criteria on which they assess work are published and clear, much of the feedback to students on different courses is discursive in nature and consists of both formative and summative assessment. Students also receive information about grades and criteria from a variety of institutional documents. This paper uses a concordance of feedback sheets to investigate the way that tutors use institutional discourse in written feedback sheets on a part-time MA(Ed) and the functions performed by the written feedback. The paper finds a high degree of congruence between the institutional and tutor corpora. Both corpora place considerable emphasis on academic conventions, yet this is not reflected in the criteria used for assessment.