Feedback is any kind of information that someone gives you about your performance, skills and/or understanding, and can represent one of the best opportunities for improving. Feedback could be a grade on your essay, or comments given to you verbally or in writing. It might come from your supervisors, but might also come from friends, family, or even from yourself.

With the Cambridge supervision system, you will receive feedback on your work on a weekly basis. However, many students don’t take notice of their feedback. This can be for many reasons, but it’s very difficult to improve without getting any input on what to do differently, and how. Ignoring your feedback makes it difficult to do better next time. So receiving feedback is not the important thing. Instead, it is what you do with it that counts.

The resources on this page have been informed by and adapted from the Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit, Higher Education Academy, 2016.

You may see these terms come up in your feedback as headers or specific points may include this vocabulary. Here are some pointers about how you could improve in these areas.

• Be more critical: When describing studies or theories, ask whether what you’ve learned about them is necessarily true – are the conclusions questionable? If so, why? Does the evidence actually support the ideas it claims to support?
• Improve your structure: The best way to improve structure is to plan your work well before you start writing. What exactly do you want to say? What does the marker need to understand first, before they can understand the rest? How can you make each section of your work flow nicely into the rest, so that the marker won’t get lost?
• Clearer use of evidence: Sometimes students feel so confident in their understanding of a topic, that they forget to show evidence to support their claims. Make sure you back up everything you say. Also, it’s always best to read your primary sources carefully, rather than just reading descriptions of those sources - do they actually say what you think they say?
• Show your workings: demonstrate how you got to your answer in order to get more helpful feedback. If you get the answer wrong but supervisors don't know why, it is difficult for them to help you improve.
• Improve your writing style: Your writing style can be hard to change so when you read books or articles, don’t just focus on what they say, but also on how they are written. If you find authors that are really clear and easy to understand, keep as examples of the kinds of style you could emulate.
• More accurate referencing: Using references appropriately is often tricky, but it’s also fairly easy to find out what to do. Check your feedback to see where you often go wrong. Sometimes it’s an aspect of formatting that you didn’t even know about. Look at our section on referencing for more information.

Feedback should be a conversation and supervisions give you an excellent opportunity to engage with it. You receive written and verbal feedback and then get a chance to ask questions and explore what that actually means in order to help you improve for next time. Use this time to ask for more specific comments, find out what went wrong so that you can improve.

Away from the face-to-face context, you should then build on what you have heard. You could write out the positive and negative comments on post-it notes and make them visible when you complete your next piece of work to remind you of what went well and what to avoid.

Or you could be more systematic and record feedback to create a 'portfolio' to help you reflect on your work over time. Have a look at these worksheets and think about whether you could build them into your working practices at Cambridge.