You scratch my feedback, I’ll scratch yours

**The University has recently launched its ‘Fabulous Feedback’ campaign. In essence, the idea is a very simple one: the best three tutors, in terms of giving feedback, are given a prize of £1000, and the students whose votes got them the coveted prize also get a reward of £100 on their Eating at Warwick cards. Great. Not only will academics give essays back faster, but there’s every chance you might get a few extra Dirty Duck meals out of it. Everybody’s happy. Who doesn’t want their essay or assignment marks back as quick as possible? **

Fabulous Feedback is just another addition to the stiflingly commercialised nature of the Warwick University environment. It is an abhorrent attempt at incentivisation. Academics did not become academics to make money, as they will tell you, but to provide a public service. The scheme is both unfair in practice and in logic.

In terms of practicality, the level of feedback is incredibly hard to measure. From lab reports on Epigenetics to essays on Kant, Warwick students produce an immensely diverse body of work in a huge variety of fields. What, then, can we use to bridge the gap between all of these fields? The answer is, of course, time taken to receive the feedback. We live in a world where everything we need or perhaps want is available to us at the click of our fingers. We are lucky, you might say. As creatures of habit we tend to want to extend this immediacy into all aspects of our everyday lives.

{{quote ‘Fabulous Feedback’ is just another addition to the stiflingly commercialised nature of the Warwick University environment }}

To study at university is to enjoy three or so years without the pressure of having to enter the ‘real world’ and all of the demons and monsters it contains- the most eminent of which would be getting a ‘real job’. But time ticks on. You get your degree and lo and behold, it’s time to get a job. For starters, you need to pay back the SLC all the money they gave you to spend on Super Noodles and the like. Did you really think that you just spend three years sitting on your arse thinking? How naive. Oh well, reality catches up to all of us eventually. Sure, you can stem the tide and do a postgraduate qualification, but there’s an empty desk with your name on it just waiting to be filled.

It seems to me that our desire to perform well at university is just as motivated by a desire to get a job, perhaps more so, than a desire to excel in a field. Fabulous Feedback, or indeed feedback in general, is motivated not by a desire to prove our academic merit, but to see if we can still apply for the internships or jobs that take our fancy.

But there are other practical issues. Certain tutors have three, four, or five times as many students as others. How can they be judged fairly on the speed and quality of their feedback? They can’t. Fabulous Feedback, then, falls short of two key practical issues: incommensurability of academic work to be returned, and differing levels of distribution of workload.

But let’s assume there are no practical issues whatsoever, and that all academic output can be put through the conveyor belt of feedback with ease: all we have to do is speed it up. This article has focused largely on the impracticality of the scheme, but my main objection is one of principle. Very few things in the 21st century are free from the long reach of the market, but with the capture of academic discourse – an area predicated upon a certain level of freedom – what else is there? E. P. Thompson, former academic at Warwick and author of Warwick University Ltd. (who left Warwick because of the increasing commercialisation of the institution) will be turning in his grave.

There will doubtless be many people who agree with a lot of things in this article. Please provide feedback: only don’t make it fabulous.