Hema Thakur on Rethinking Feedback in Indian Classrooms

Hema Thakur, a trainer for academic editors and researchers, has over nine years of experience in the academic author services industry. Drawing from her extensive exposure to the field, she has also ventured into research. Her published work is available here: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-2624-6440.

Since 2019, a trend has emerged in the education sector: Many private school teachers have been asked to do away with the traditional red pen in favor of alternative colors when marking assignments. This initiative has received mixed reactions. To examine whether the focus is on the right issue, Hema surveyed professionals from the education field. Here are some insights from the conversations she had.

Some teachers criticized the emphasis on rote learning and stringent marking schemes: “There are questions like ‘give reasons why King XYZ invaded an area’, but students are expected to reproduce how the said king did so (based on what they memorize), capturing details like the strategy, time periods, campaigns, and battalion names. If I were asked ‘why’, I would probably say that the king simply wanted to expand their scope as a result of their ambition,” laughed a professor. Despite being fully aware of this, they have to mark students according to the rubric.  

Another aspect is constructive feedback. “Remarks like ‘disappointing answer’ are hardly constructive,” said another teacher. “Students shouldn’t have to worry about our disappointment or personal feelings with respect to their answers.”  

Giving students the benefit of the doubt has been another point of contention. “If  a question has two parts, and let’s say the solution for Part B depends on the answer to Part A, and the student gets the first part wrong (because of a minor calculation mistake, for example), making it impossible for Part B’s answers to be correct, many of us penalize them twice,” said a college professor.  “However, as long as they apply the correct methodology for Part B, and the incorrect answer is purely attributable to the incorrect input from Part A’s answer, I would argue that they deserve full marks for the second part.”

“Commenting on trends distinguishes mentors from examiners,” an associate professor remarked. “For instance, if something is incomplete, that’s all examiners will note. A mentor’s note will be more detailed rather than specific to a particular test. You would expect something like ‘your coverage of related studies is generally strong, but the conclusions tend to seem rushed’ – this way, a mentor helps students apply these learnings to future tests as well.”

A lot of teachers emphasized the importance of calibration, as the same answer should receive the same mark regardless of the teacher checking the assignment. “There are teachers who are known as more stringent or laxer than others,” commented an education counselor. “These discrepancies make it difficult for students to understand what to expect and take away from objectivity.”

Based on the inputs shared by faculty members, Hema concurs that  while there’s no harm in rethinking tools (especially if it benefits even a small percentage of students), a systematic overhaul is rather the need of the hour – and this begins with educational board members and policymakers asking deep questions of themselves, not just of students.