What Students Actually Do with "Grades"
Collaborative Assessment for Increasing Student Engagement with Instructor Feedback
Before I implemented a collaborative assessment process in my introduction to literary studies course, only about 30% of students said they were “very likely” to read instructor feedback on their assignments. After one semester of collaborative assessment? Over 80% said they’d be “very likely” to read feedback in the future.
What exactly is collaborative assessment, and why does it seem to solve the problem that keeps so many of us grading papers at midnight—the gnawing suspicion that our carefully crafted feedback goes largely unread?
How Collaborative Assessment Works
Collaborative assessment sits somewhere on the spectrum with ungrading, but it differs significantly from pure student self-assessment. Here’s how I designed it for my literary studies course:
Step 1: Students submit their work knowing they’ll be part of the assessment process. This isn’t a surprise sprung on them after they’ve already mentally moved on to their next assignment.
Step 2: I provide detailed written feedback using the language of our course rubric, but I don’t assign a grade. Instead, I focus on specific strengths, areas for improvement, and concrete suggestions for revision.
Step 3: Students read my feedback, then complete a structured reflection where they:
Identify what they learned about their writing from my response
Explain how they would revise if given the opportunity
Propose a grade for their work, including the proposed revision, with justification based on the rubric
Students receive feedback when they’re still intellectually and emotionally invested in the work, and they have genuine agency in the evaluation process—not just the illusion of choice.
What Changed: The Data
I regularly survey my students throughout the semester—partly to evaluate my own teaching practices, but also as a way to engage them in metacognitive reflection about their learning processes. These surveys have become invaluable for understanding not just whether something “works,” but why it works and how students experience different pedagogical approaches.
The survey results from this collaborative assessment experiment tell a clear story. When I asked students about their likelihood of reading instructor feedback before this collaborative process:
30% said “very likely”
44% said “somewhat likely”
The rest fell into neutral or unlikely categories
After the collaborative assessment experience:
86% said they’d be “very likely” to read instructor feedback in future courses
14% said “somewhat likely”
Zero students said they’d be unlikely to read feedback
But the quantitative data only tells part of the story. The qualitative responses reveal something deeper about what happens when students become genuine partners in assessment.
One student reflected on how the process helped them develop critical thinking skills about their own work, noting that the detailed feedback allowed them to analyze their writing more deeply than they’d ever been able to do before. Another appreciated the opportunity to articulate what they would have done differently, especially since that reflection could potentially improve their grade.
Productive Failure
What strikes me most about this process is how it allows students to fail productively. In traditional assessment, failure is often terminal—you get a C- or D, feel bad about it, and try to move on. But in collaborative assessment, struggle becomes generative.
When a student submits work that doesn’t meet expectations, my feedback can focus entirely on growth rather than justification of a grade. The student then has to grapple seriously with that feedback, not just to understand what went wrong but to articulate what they would do differently—and to understand what they did right and how they can continue to incorporate the most successful aspects of their writing. This metacognitive step—the moment when they have to explain their learning process—seems to be what makes a real difference.
I’ve watched students discover insights about their own thinking that they never would have reached if I’d simply slapped a B+ on their paper and moved on. They identify patterns in their writing they hadn’t noticed, recognize the gap between their intentions and their execution, and develop a vocabulary for talking about their own learning process.
Resistance to Feedback?
This experiment made me reconsider some fundamental assumptions about how feedback functions in our courses. We often frame student resistance to feedback as laziness or disengagement, but it’s probably more likely a rational response to a system that positions them as passive recipients rather than active learners.
Traditional feedback from the student perspective looks something like this: You spend hours of your life working on an assignment, submit it, and cross your fingers as you wait for a grade. In the meantime, which is often in the range of weeks, you’ve moved on. Eventually, you get back a paper covered in far too many comments to realistically figure out how to apply to your next writing context. That’s if you’re lucky—because I’ve heard from plenty of students that no one is reading their work.
Collaborative assessment disrupts this dynamic. Students receive feedback when they’re still connected to the work, and they have a genuine reason to engage with it—because their grade depends not just on what they initially produced, but on their ability to understand and respond to instructor guidance.
Agency
Collaborative assessment gives students actual agency in their learning, not just the performance of choice. They’re not selecting from pre-determined options or filling out self-reflection forms that ultimately change nothing. They’re genuinely partnering in the assessment process, which means they have to take genuine responsibility for their learning.
This shift in agency seems to create what one student called “a real stake” in the feedback process. When students know they’ll need to defend their self-assessment, they read feedback differently—not as judgment from on high, but as information they need to process, understand, and respond to.
By giving up control over final grades, I actually gained more influence over student learning. When I was the sole arbiter of evaluation, students could dismiss my feedback as subjective or unfair. But when they have to engage seriously with my response in order to participate in their own assessment, they can’t simply write it off. The process creates a different kind of accountability—not the external pressure of grades, but the internal pressure of having to understand and articulate their own learning process.
Feedback Culture
Before looking at some of the broader implications of this practice, I want to acknowledge a crucial limitation: this process requires the ability to provide detailed, high-quality feedback quickly. That’s not feasible for everyone, especially those teaching 4/4 or 5/5 loads for poverty wages. The labor intensiveness of meaningful feedback is a structural problem in higher education that individual pedagogical innovations can’t solve. What I’m describing here worked in my context—smaller class sizes, reasonable teaching loads—but it’s not a panacea for systemic issues around academic labor.
That said, the collaborative assessment experiment raises uncomfortable questions about how we typically structure feedback in our courses. If students are more likely to read and engage with instructor responses when they have genuine agency in the process, what does that say about our traditional approaches?
Maybe the problem isn’t that students don’t care about feedback. Maybe the problem is that we’ve created systems where caring about feedback feels pointless.
The process isn’t perfect, and it requires more time and emotional labor—a lot more—than traditional grading. But when feedback becomes genuinely collaborative—when it’s part of an ongoing conversation about learning rather than a final verdict—students seem to rediscover reasons to engage with it. They read more carefully, think more deeply, and take more responsibility for their own growth.
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