Picture the first essay you hand in at university. You've worked hard on it. Read more than you needed to. Agonised over the introduction, rewritten the conclusion six times, and finally submitted it at 2am feeling equal parts proud and terrified. And of course, you’re now waiting for some useful feedback.

If you're like most new students, you're hoping for something thoughtful. Notes in the margin explaining where your thinking worked and where it wandered. A proper paragraph at the end telling you, clearly and kindly, what to do differently next time. Something like a tutor or coach sitting beside you, walking you through your own work.

I'm going to save you some heartache. That’s almost never what turns up.

What turns up is a grade. A number, or a letter. And then a few comments that look like feedback but tell you nothing you can actually use.

You read the comments. You feel that little drop in your stomach. Then you go hunting for what you did wrong, and the comments don't tell you, because, and let’s be honest, wtf does be more critical actually mean to a first-year student?!

This isn't a story about lecturers being too lazy to give you detailed feedback.

Before you start picturing some bored academic who couldn't be bothered, that's not what's going on. A typical module might have a hundred students. Every one of them hands in an essay. The person marking them is also teaching, researching, sitting on committees, maybe finishing their own PhD, and they've got a fixed and frankly brutal window to mark the lot and hand them back. By essay number twenty, there is no energy left for detailed, personal, here's-exactly-what-to-fix guidance. What they have energy for is whatever is quick to write, easy to defend, and works for almost anybody.
Needs more analysis, be more critical, and similar feedback tropes fit practically any essay ever written.

There's something else going on too. In most universities, written feedback exists mainly to justify the grade, to leave a trail explaining why you got 58 and not 62. That is a completely different job from teaching you how to get the 62 next time.
Feedback is usually doing the first job — justifying the grade. Most students think it's doing the second — providing constructive feedback.

Why the vague stuff stings

Vague feedback lands in different ways. Some students get angry at the marker. Some shrug it off and never think about it again. But a lot of them — usually the ones who care most — turn it inward.

You spent days on the thing. Someone with authority read it and found it lacking. So the question that arises isn't: "What's wrong with this assignment?" It's: "What's wrong with me?" And because the comment doesn't point anywhere in particular, the search turns inward and grabs the nearest doubt lying around. And that’s usually self-doubt.

Maybe I'm not as clever as I thought. Maybe everyone else gets something I don't. Maybe I'm the only one floundering.

None of that follows from a handful of words scribbled at the bottom of a page. But it feels like it does, because the vagueness leaves a gap, and you'll fill that gap with whatever anxiety you walked in carrying.

That's the trap. And the students who fall into it hardest are exactly the ones who've already shown up, done the reading, and cared enough to ask what went wrong. The student who's checked-out shrugs and forgets it. The conscientious one reads needs more analysis at midnight, over and over, trying to wring meaning out of words.

Start by expecting vague feedback. Not without irritation, of course. Just be aware that assignment feedback is often unclear. If you start university with the expectation that assignment feedback is supposed to read like a detailed written tutorial, every vague comment is going to land like a slap. But if you begin with the understanding that feedback is often a quick, pressured signal from an overloaded system, you can do something far more useful with it. You can stop taking it to heart and start treating it as one piece of information among several.

Because the feedback is not the only thing that can tell you whether your work is any good. It's just the loudest, the one with a grade attached to it, so it feels like the only one. But you can build others. You can learn to read your own essays the way a marker would. You can find the gaps before anybody else does. You can stop waiting for someone to hand you the diagnosis, and start writing it yourself.

That's a skill. It can be learned. And it's the single biggest thing separating the students who get better every year from the ones who keep collecting the same comment and keep having no idea what to do with it.

University feedback won't be what you're hoping for. Once you make peace with that, it stops being an irritation, and starts being something you can get ahead of.

I've written a lot more about this. My book Needs More Analysis: A Uni Survival Guide to Decoding Academic Feedback is out now. It won't tell you to "just ask your tutor for clarification" and leave it there. It takes the most vague, maddening comments — needs more analysis, be more critical — and decodes what they actually mean so you can act on them.

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— Petros