Formative coursework is a bit of an opinion divider among students. You may hear many of your peers emphasising the fact that it ‘”doesn’t count”. However, while technically correct, this proclamation evades the very point of studying at university which is to LEARN. Formative coursework is the best way to consolidate what you have heard in lectures or read in readings.
There are a few reasons why I think this. Firstly, the act of actually doing the assignments forces you to draw on the knowledge that you’ve learned through your programme. Secondly, practice makes perfect; the more essays you write or problem sets you tackle, the easier they will get. And finally, submitting formative coursework is an opportunity to get some valuable feedback from your class teachers.
Over my time at LSE (be it less than a year so far), I have developed a system which works for me, helping me to make the most of my formative feedback. I am convinced that this approach is the best way to make the most of your feedback, but then again, I am biased. Still, it may be a great starting point for anyone feeling a little overwhelmed by their formative feedback.
My first tip sounds obvious, really, but I’m sure there are some people who don’t follow it. Make sure you dedicate a decent amount of time to READ your formative feedback. By this I don’t mean a quick scan for anything that seems particularly important – I mean read the whole feedback in depth; your teacher won’t have written anything that’s not important.
What you do after reading your feedback depends on the type of assignment it was. If it was a problem set, it’s important to understand exactly where your mistakes were. It can be helpful to retry the parts/questions that you didn’t get right – putting feedback into action can help with consolidation. If it was an essay, read the feedback again but this time take notes to try and summarise the main points that you need to improve on. I find making bullet points from my feedback to be a very useful exercise. Something that has helped me was creating a document to which I add all of these bullet points every time I get feedback. This way I have ended up with a list of things that I know I need to remember which I refer to whenever I need to write another essay, formative or summative.
The last thing I recommend doing after receiving and interpreting your feedback is to book an office hour with the teacher that gave it. This is really useful if you have any questions about your feedback, want to dispute any of their criticisms (which is totally fine – we learn through debate), or simply go into more depth on your feedback. Office hours can be competitive to book, so make sure this is high on your priorities list so you can be prompt. Taking advantage of office hours is one of the best ways to make the most of your time at LSE.
I hope that some of these tips are useful. But if they’re not, please try something else – it can be difficult trying to figure out what works for you, especially if you’ve just started university. I will leave you with one of the most important things to remember when it comes to formative feedback: there is no such thing as bad feedback as long as you learn from it! It is tough but the ability to take constructive criticism in your stride will serve you well in life, and what better place to learn this skill than at university?
