First-class honours? Wipe that smile off your face - when it comes to learning, it's feedback that counts.

A group of 34 prominent academics is calling for wide-reaching changes to the way universities test and assess students, Times Higher Education (April 24) reports. An obsession with marking and grades encourages students to adopt a strategic approach to their studies at the expense of real learning, the Weston Manor group says. It points to a crisis in university assessment and calls for reforms to change the way that students study.

“The need to get a ‘good degree' makes assessment the main driver for students - there is too much focus on the narrow purpose of attaining a grade,” says Dr Colin Bryson, learning and teaching co-ordinator at Nottingham Business School. Academics should not think that students would engage with a task only if it involved marks, he says. “The key purpose of assessment - learning - gets lost.”

Gaining marks dominates students' thinking and leads them to ignore accompanying comments, the group says, and is largely unnecessary. “You don't need to assess students 100 times to produce a meaningful degree classification; about ten times is quite sufficient,” says Professor Graham Gibbs, of the University of Oxford's learning institute. “Most people are spending their academic time on the wrong bit of assessment.”

Marks do not make a degree

Academics believe the obsession with grades encourages students to adopt a strategic approach to their studies at the expense of real learning

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The National Student Survey finds assessment the area with which students are least satisfied. David Nicol, professor of higher education at the University of Strathclyde, says that teachers need to improve written feedback, but that students are also to blame, with many unwilling to participate in one-to-one meetings or exam feedback sessions. Feedback is the most influential and most neglected teaching practice, according to studies.

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