‘What do I have to do to get a first?’

It is something I don’t recall hearing so often when I started out in this profession, but it’s a generic refrain I hear over and over these days, most often in the wake of the release of marks: ‘What do I have to do to get a first’ or ‘What do I have to do to get a higher mark?’

I have a duty to answer this kind of query, of course, and I often find myself falling back on the usual pointers about critical thinking, cogent argument and doing more secondary reading. I know a lot of colleagues have the same experiences. But I wonder if we need to read the signs more clearly, if we in fact need to adjust our supportive behaviours.

The common response to student dissatisfaction, to worrying NSS ‘scores’ or module feedback is very often, it seems, a case of rearranging the furniture (or of adding even more furniture) rather than looking more carefully at the room, and the building, that houses them. And I don’t mean that dismissively – we all work tirelessly to find the solutions. But I fear that our common responses are usually of the order of doing what we already do more obviously, doing more of it, explaining more that we are doing it and making sure that we communicate these things all the more, in print, verbally, in online learning environments, in emails, tweets, facebook pages and so on. This exhausts us, and exasperatingly seems not always to make much difference, when questionnaire and NSS feedback arrives. It’s a bit like building more roads to ease congestion, only to find those roads getting clogged up by the more cars that come out to make use of them.

Year after year we get students who express dissatisfaction with assessment, with the kind or amount of feedback we give, with the support we offer in approaching assessment tasks, with the very assessment criteria themselves. This can initiate a kind of bunker mentality in academics – ‘what more can we do?’ At times it’s exasperating: for a recent module, I set aside four hours of seminar time to address the essay titles in advance, I handed out suggested secondary reading, I initiated discussion on the essay titles, on the reading, and on the materials that might be used in answering questions. I offered to see students individually to discuss essay plans. And yet, on the module questionnaire came the complaint ‘I don’t feel supported enough doing assessments’. The instinct is to reject this kind of statement; we know how hard we work – in terms of input and in terms of sheer hours – and sometimes the sanest response is to switch off the computer, close the files and go home.

But there are risks for us in not asking where this seeming increased demand from students is coming from, and that’s a demand in terms of volume of work and in terms of varieties of modes of support. Importantly, there are risks in not being able to address it effectively and efficiently. The solutions do not lie, I suspect, in just doing what we always do. All members of the community, staff and students, could just become more frustrated. What has to change?

One clear reason why students ask stuff like ‘what do I have to do to get a first?’ is because the overwhelming common experience many of them have had at A-levels and before is that they get offered a set of things they must achieve in order to pass assessment successfully. It is wired in the very grammar of the their learning experience to date. We do them or ourselves no good not to recognise this language and seek to translate it to a Higher Education grammar of learning at the first opportunity. I don’t think we’ve done anything like enough yet. Of course, the consumerisation of HE has not helped, as the fact of students facing lifetime debts of up to £120,000 for an undergraduate degree quite understandably contaminates the learning environment with an tug of entitlement that can only undermine a genuine learning experience. If you’re going to pay for something for much of the rest of your life, you sure as hell want and deserve the maximum benefit from it. So, what do you have to do to get a first? How is it going to be given to you? Of course you begin to articulate those things.

Assessment criteria are part of the apparatus, our grammar, that we mobilise to test and measure students. They used to be tucked away in files and folders, and then in staff intranets, before being wielded transparently in module handbooks for students to check. And they remain broadly unchanged in making that journey. I think these documents are written well and fit for purpose. They can benefit from the odd tweak here and there, and we perhaps need to do more to have them suited to all forms of assessment we do, but they offer a framework to do what needs to be done. But when examined from the point of view of someone looking for clues as to what to do to improve their grades, they fall flat. They cause confusion. They seem difficult to understand, perhaps because they look like a map, but are not. As one set of eyes surveys their familiar contours with regular attention, another set stares at them in bewilderment, looking for a key that is not there, that was never meant to be there. They might be used to indicate how we judge a piece of work to have attained a certain achievement level, but they fail to explain how that achievement might be improved. That’s not what they’re there for.

As I’ve intimated above, I see a fundamental problem here as two different languages being spoken in the same community. I doesn’t help that one is a discourse of established ‘authority’ and another is spoken from a platform of gradually increasing authority (by which I mean the student as consumer, which is ‘a bad thing’, but also the student as a stakeholder in their own education, taken all the more seriously as such, which is ‘a good thing’). At its worst, that failure to speak the same language results in student complaints, group dissatisfaction, demands for explanations, investigations, condemnation of staff. It can get ugly. It can also result in staff fatigue, stress, low self-esteem, a sense of being bullied almost by a system that seemingly validates any complaint simply because it has been uttered. This is not a way forward.

When I applied to be the Director of Student Education for the School of English, I tried to address this issue of different languages, so to call it, by proposing a fresh look at the staff/student community. I put it this way in my letter of application:

I think that there are further ways that our students’ experience can be better supported locally, and would articulate my vision in terms of three sides of a triangle: community, investment and dialogue. Students work better when they hold an increased sense of their place in an academic community, what they gain from it but also how their activities and participation enriches it. Increased awareness of community leads to greater investment in that community, generating pride, ambassadorial spirit and a greater understanding of the needs of all members of that community (including staff needs). Such understanding is the basis of meaningful dialogue between stakeholders, whether that dialogue be facilitated through student:staff forums, research seminars, co-curriculum activities or the regular bread and butter of our work: seminars, lectures, workshops, tutorials and so on. [I want to ] bring students across cohorts together to discuss their place in a programme, its contents, its objectives, its teaching modes, staff experience and the student staff contract, and to do so precisely to reinforce the key experiences of community, investment and dialogue.

I continue to believe the way forward is through a constant and repeated attempt break the ‘us and them’ relationship that can emerge between staff and students, and bring about this triangle of community, investment and dialogue. Those of my colleagues whom I admire the most, I think, already achieve this quite naturally in their classroom interactions, but the institutional structures haven’t yet yielded to any new paradigm, perhaps because that new paradigm cannot – perhaps must not – come from within those institutional structures. That’s difficult when we’re charged with such creative problem solving from within. I think there is a genuine desire to achieve all this where I work, some committed people and some promising, dynamic initiatives. I hope we get there. Until then, we can keep chipping away at atrophied behaviours, our own as well as those of the Establishment. And keep talking, keep questioning, and most of all keep listening.