The message below was sent out in response to USS feedback to students in 2019: Hi all, I would like to thank you for what I thought was a very enjoyable semester. From my perspective, many of you were really engaged with the content and produced fantastic work. I hope you felt the same! Here you will find attached a summary of the mark breakdown for the whole course, and also a summary of your USS responses, although not the written comments. In terms of the comments, I would like you to know how seriously we take it, and so I will try to summarise the main points that you raised and what changes will be implemented in 2020 that follow on from these comments. My main takeaways from your feedback were: The matlab assignment. We asked you to do the USS just after this assignment was due, and so there is (at least in my mind) a predominance of comments related to this question because of the timing. Over 90% of your comments related directly to this assessment task. Notwithstanding, I definitely take on board that many of you felt a bit adrift when working on this assignment, and that I was asking too much of your matlab skills. I understand your comments and would like you to know that I take them strongly on board. In 2020, there will be much greater support for specifically matlab-related issues (unrelated to understanding of the course material). I will endeavour to set up drop in tutors which are available in PNR so that students can just walk over and ask for matlab support in person during the week leading up to the assignment being due. At the same time, I strongly believe that this assignment allowed a significant number of you (I would say over 75%) to perform at an exceptionally high level in the final report, producing work that is both rigorously based on complex fundamental mathematics, and also directly relevant to a current engineering work. This isn't a small thing! I hope you are all proud of being able to produce such work - I am definitely proud of what many of you achieved. In terms of the rationale for the assessment, I hope that with a bit of reflection you can see how we were able to directly link the fundamental equations with a real world example by using MATLAB. It is something that would have been impossible to do without a sophisticated computer simulation. Alternatively, I could have asked you to do a few hand calculations during an in-class quiz (such as in 2018) or by a take home assignment (such as in 2017). The advantage of developing your programming skills, however, is that having solved the problem once, you could then go on to use it in a very real design situation (i.e. in your major project). This kind of problem solving using a computational approach is exactly what future employers are looking for in graduates (as we and others have found in a variety of surveys of employers recently), and is something that I urge you to continue to develop over the course of your degree. Unclear assessment criteria. Many of you commented that you didn't know what to do to be able to address the assessment criteria and earn the mark that you were targeting in the assessments. This issue is a bit of a double edged sword. In class we discussed the vagueness of the marking criteria on a few occasions, and I tried to make my rationale on this clear, but for those that were not there (most of you) I will try to make it clear here. In my opinion, which seems to diverge from many of yours, this vagueness was an intentional feature of the assessment design. I attempted to allow you to be creative in your choice of methods and structure in responding to a relatively open ended assessment. It is unfortunately impossible to be both exact in setting specific marking criteria and also allow for open ended work to be completed. Where I was vague, that was with the intention of allowing freedom on your part. This definitely translated into some excellent creative work from many of you, but appears to have also caused significant distress amongst many. Following your comments, I will in 2020 change the marking rubric to explicitly include creativity as a criteria. The idea is not to punish you for not reading the mind of the marker, but attempts to allow you creative freedom in how you address the problem. I hope that this will alleviate this issue. Feedback. Many of you indicated in question q6 below that the feedback you received was not helpful for your learning. There were only two written comments which delved a bit deeper into what exactly you were looking for in terms of feedback, but one was related to the timeliness of feedback, and the other to the lack of feedback given between assessments to help you gauge your progress. The timeliness I can definitely improve on, as assessment marking took an unnecessarily long time in 2019 - which is my fault and not your tutors. I will attempt to restructure the marking process in 2020 so that feedback is given more rapidly after each assessment. For the second part, of giving feedback outside of the assessments themselves, I am not sure exactly what to do on that front. If any of you have ideas, please feel free to email me or drop by my office to have a chat. I genuinely would like to hear from you. Tutorials. I received about a 50/50 split in comments on the usefulness of the tutorials. For about half of you, these were the highlight of the course. For the other half, they were of limited usefulness. From your comments, I gather that those who were attending the tutorials with the idea that the attendance would improve their performance in the assessment tasks were those that were disappointed with them. I understand this philosophy, and I see where you are coming from. I am, however, a bit unsure as to what I can do for each specific tutorial to try to improve this situation. I welcome any further comments you have on the topic, so please email me or drop in if you have any further opinions or specific improvements in mind. Finally, I would like to thank all of you again for an excellent semester. I wish you all the best of luck in the future and hope to see you around the university, If you're ever looking for a chat and a cup of tea to discuss your degree, your career or anything else, please drop by my office, I always try to be free (although in semester one I'm much freer!). Benjy