Against Feedback

A Novel Kind of Conformity

Tim Parks

Art Resource
Is it really possible to be free as a writer? Free from an immediate need for money, free from the need to be praised, free from the concern of how those close to you will respond to what you write, free from the political implications, free from your publisher’s eagerness for a book that looks like the last, or worse still, like whatever the latest fashion might be?

When you’re trying to write something seriously new, don’t show it to anybody until it’s finished, don’t talk about it, seek no feedback at all. Cultivate a quiet separateness. “Anything great and bold,” observed Robert Walser “must be brought about in secrecy and silence, or it perishes and falls away, and the fire that was awakened dies.”

Indy wrote:Mhm, ja pisem nesto sto sam zamislio da bude skroz mediokritetsko. Moram da pitam kako se ljudima svidja, da slucajno ne bi ispala velika literatura.

There is now more assessment – and more marking – than ever before, no longer confined to the single, dreaded exam period. An undergraduate student of philosophy at my university might take four modules each term, each with at least two assessed components, typically an essay and something else. Each module must include a ‘scaffolding’ component: an exercise intended to help the student with the main task. This element must itself be assessed, because otherwise most students wouldn’t do it (hardly surprising in an education system that denigrates any endeavour engaged in for its own sake). One example of scaffolding might be an essay plan. How do you mark an essay plan? Another option is a spoken presentation. Some ‘module leaders’ – managerial speak for ‘lecturers’, deliverers of ‘learning events’ – will set a weekly quiz, weighted at perhaps 10 per cent of the overall module mark.

The effect of all this is that an enormous amount of energy is diverted into the management of an ever more intricate system of continuous assessment. A student doing four modules can expect to have at least eight assessment ‘checkpoints’ in a term. It’s hardly surprising that the questions most often asked of teachers by students are about the bureaucratic details of the assessments, or that staff increasingly find it necessary to set aside class time to explain them. The feeling – on both sides, I suspect – is of being exhausted before the work has begun, of never getting round to the thing itself.

Students want – or think they want – more and faster feedback. So tutors write more and more, faster and faster, producing paragraph on paragraph that students, in moments of sheepish honesty, sometimes admit they don’t read. However infuriating, it’s understandable. This material is far from our best work. Much of it is vague, rushed or cribbed.