Introduction

When you are in the laboratory your learning will be supported by a combination of academic staff, teaching fellows and trained teaching assistants. All of them will teach you throughout your time in the laboratory with a combination of group sessions and one-to-one tuition.

An important aspect of any learning process is giving each student feedback on performance. This is a continuous process during your laboratory sessions. Informal discussion between students and/ or between staff and students is of incredible value in increasing understanding. You should make sure that you take full advantage of the feedback opportunities available throughout your sessions by getting involved in discussion about chemistry with your colleagues and tutors. Remember that effective feedback starts with an effective input from you!

You can expect

• Electronic automated feedback on your pre-lab quizzes - Immediately on taking the quiz.
• Verbal feedback on your practical performance - During your laboratory sessions.
• Verbal feedback on your interim reports and lab-book - When submitted for assessment.
• Verbal feedback (in-lab) on some of your reports - Provided it has been established you have already accessed the online feedback for the report (since the primary purpose of the in-lab feedback is to clarify any feedback comments you are not clear on.
• Online feedback on your main report - Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the report. The majority of the focus of the remainder of this page will be on the online report feedback aspects of feedback.

Accessing Report Feedback

Reports are submitted via "Turnitin", which is accessed via Blackboard. Once feedback on your submitted report is available you can view it by following the same "Turnitin" instructions for submission, but (after Step 5) selecting "View" instead of "Submit".

Overview of Online Report Feedback

Once you have completed an experiment and the report has been submitted it will be assessed. The purpose of the assessment is to arrive at a mark that will contribute to your module grade. In addition, the assessment will identify your strengths and weaknesses and comments on these will be provided.

Online feedback on your report will normally be available within two weeks of the submission deadline of your report (provided the report was submitted by the deadline). If your feedback has not appeared within this time then there may be a problem and a polite email to the relevant lab manager may be needed.

The feedback will appear on the submitted report (viewed via "Turnitin") and will include a provisional mark (out of 10) for the work. Note that all marks for all assessed components of all Level 4 Lab practicals will be listed together and available to view on the Marks Section of this site - For more information see the "About the Marks Service" section on this page (below).

Interpretation & Expectations

The purpose of the report feedback is to indicate (either specifically or generally) areas/issues/topics where you have performed well and to identify areas/issues that could be improved.

Although the feedback will indicate where mistakes have been made or poor practice used, it will not provide the correct answers to questions answered incorrectly, or in any way do your work or thinking for you. For example, you can expect comments like "You have incorrectly identified this reaction (2) as the rate limiting step" rather than "Rate limiting step is actually reaction 5".

The expectation we have of you is that:

• You will apply the issued feedback in maintaining the areas of high standard and improving your work in other areas.
• Where the feedback indicates there was a mistake (e.g. in a calculation or an answer to a question) - You, having had the source of the mistake identified, will contribute subsequently to get to the correct result/answer.

This means to make the best use of your online feedback you should attempt to apply the comments whilst looking at the original report, so you can identify exactly what it was you did well and what could be improved.

Standard Definitions

Quite often different graders will use the same common comments, e.g. "Good". However this can lead to confusion since one graders understanding of "good" may not be the same as anothers - and neither definition may exactly match what you think it means. Therefore it has been agreed that, when used (by graders in both the Level 4 and Level 5 Labs), the following six comments will have the definition specified.

COMMENT	DEFINITION
Excellent	This is written/performed to a very high standard. It is correct, complete and well presented. I cannot suggest how this could be improved.
Very good	Content/calculation and style is correct with, at most, a few minor aspects that could be improved; none of which have resulted in a loss of marks.
Good	Content/calculation and style is correct with a few minor aspects that could be improved.
Good effort	A clear/significant attempt has been made to answer the question or perform the analysis, but it is not completely correct.
?	You need to include an explanation/justification for this.
???	I have absolutely no idea what you are doing here, so I am not in a position to comment further.

NOTE: "Excellent" and "Very good" correspond to FULL MARKS for that element.

Querying Feedback

If you are unsatisfied with the feedback you have received; it will likely fall into two categories: (1) Clarification or (2) Quality.

1. Feedback Clarification & Expansion Requests

If after having tried to apply your feedback you do not understand some of the comments, or you would like clarification/expansion of aspects of it, you can request this from the appropriate Lab Manager. Note: Before doing so you might want to consider asking one of your peers to look at the feedback comments to see if they can shed light on their meaning.

To request feedback clarification or additional feedback - Write an e-mail to the relevant Lab Manager. The e-mail must:

• State the name of the of the practical.
• Specify the feedback comments you are querying (including an explanation of what/why you are querying them).
• Raising (with reasons) any other issues.
• It would also be useful (and reduce the time it will take for you to receive a reply) if you include as an attachment the report with the feedback comments (which you can download from the Blackboard site).

After receiving your e-mail (and looking into the issues you have raised) the Lab Manager will either address these in an e-mailed reply or arrange a meeting with you to discuss what you have raised. Note: If you receive an email which you do not feel fully covers/clarifies what you have requested, you should raise this with the Lab Manager again.

Please be aware that you may not receive additional feedback if:

1. Your e-mail does not highlight the specific issues you have with the feedback.
   Without this information, generating additional feedback becomes extremely time consuming (to the point where it would be necessary to severely limit the number of these requests that could be actioned).

2. It becomes evident on investigating your request, that you have not read your lab report thoroughly (in conjunction with the feedback) before requesting additional feedback.
   For example, if the first of several issues you are raising is the feedback comment "annotate your spectra", and there are clearly unannotated spectra in your report, then the remainder of your request may not be investigated.

3. The request is not sent in a timely fashion.
   To be most effective feedback needs to be studied/applied as soon as possible, i.e. while the work to which it applies is freshest in your memory. Leaving the request for several weeks (or months) is not good practice and in this situation it is questionable whether it is useful to supply additional feedback to supplement that which apparently was not looked at promptly in the first place.

4. The request is simply a complaint about the mark you were awarded, without backing this up with reasoning (that takes into consideration the feedback comments received).
   The purpose in listing report marks is NOT so they can form the basis of a negotiation. As such marks can only be queried if the request includes supporting evidence/reasoning, e.g. I have appended my "Thermodynamic Principles" report (with feedback comments) below. The only problems mentioned were units ("Make sure you include (correct) units when citing values") and graph presentation ("Give informative titles to plots"). I do not have a problem with the first point since on a few occasions (namely the intermediate values in the delta G calculation) I did make a mistake with my units. However, I did include what I think are informative titles for all my graphs. In addition, the listed report mark is 5/10 which suggests to me that (even if there are issues with my plot titles) there must be more aspects of the report that could be improved. Please could you look into this for me.

2. Feedback Quality Issues

If you believe that the feedback you have received for a particular report is not of a satisfactory standard (i.e. poor quality feedback rather than feedback needing clarification): Check with your peers to see if this is an isolated incident (i.e. just affecting your report for this practical) or a more general problem.

• If an isolated incident - Follow the requesting clarification procedure and raise this issue as part of the request.
• If affecting more than just yourself - E-mail the appropriate Lab Manager about this issue. Make sure you include in the e-mail:
  1. The name of the practical.
  2. The names of the other students who are also unsatisfied with the feedback received for this practical.
  3. Some examples of the unsatisfactory feedback and (if needed) a brief explanation of why you feel they are unsatisfactory.
  4. Although not a requirement for inclusion in your e-mail, in this situation it would also be extremely helpful if you could contrast this with practicals whose report feedback you have been happy with. This may facilitate improvement of the problem graders feedback by allowing us to direct them to exemplar feedback.

Make sure you do NOT leave the reporting of any such issues to the end of course - Nothing can be done to improve the situation until staff know of the problem.

About the Marks Service

The Marks Section of this website provides access to all your component and overall marks for the Level 4 Lab courses, along with various other statistics and records (i.e. attendance, submission, mark distribution and rankings).

To access your record:

• Go to the Marks Section of this website.
• Select the link for your Year and Semester.
• Click on your Student ID Number from the list displayed.

You Level 4 Lab Record will start by listing the last 3 digits of your Student ID Number (so you can check that you didn't select the wrong record). Following this there will be three sections - "Your Record", "Class Performance" and "Feedback Statistics".

1. Your Record

This is a presented as a table. The first rows of the table will each relate to a particular practical and will display (in column order):

• The COURSE CODE the practical is associated with and the PRACTICAL TITLE.

• Your ATTENDANCE record for that practical session.
  KEY: = Attended the session; = Not scheduled to attend the practical session (or Validated Absence); = Unvalidated Absence (which you should contact the Lab Manager about immediately); If blank it means there is not yet data for this field..
  Note: The Attendance record is uploaded roughly once a week.

• Your SUBMISSION record for the Main Report.
  KEY: = Submitted on time; - = Submitted # working days late; = Not submitted or submitted more than 5 working days late; If blank it means there is not yet data for this field.
  Note: The Submission record is only updated when Main Report marks are uploaded.

• Your COMPONENT MARKS (out of 10) for assessed components (e.g. Pre-lab, Lab-book, In-lab Assessment, Results Quality and Main Report).
  KEY: 0-10 = Mark out of 10; - = This component not assessed for this practical; If blank it means there is not yet data for this field..
  Note: Pre-lab marks are uploaded roughly every two weeks; In-lab assessment marks approximately once a week; Results and report marks less than one week after the report has been graded (and online feedback uploaded).

• Your TOTAL MARK (as a %) for that practical, i.e. a combination of your Component Marks, weighted as detailed in the Practical Script. If you do not have a complete set of Component Marks for that practical, then the Total will be calculated based just on the Component Marks you do have and will be shaded pink; whilst if the Total has been calculated from a complete set of Component Marks then it will be shaded white.
  Note: The Total mark is revised every time there is a change in your online record for this practical.

• The CLASS AVERAGE (%) for that practical, i.e. the average TOTAL (%) mark achieved by the class for the practical. This is calculated from the TOTAL (%) of students who have a complete set of COMPONENT MARKS for this practical.
  Note: The Class Average mark is revised every time there is a change in the online practical records.

Note: Practicals for which you do not yet have data will not appear in the table.

The table always contains two final rows. The first of these details the AVERAGE MARK you have achieved for each Component and also shows (shaded in green) the average Practical mark you have (currently) achieved. The second of these rows details the CLASS AVERAGE for the Components and Practicals. Note: TOTAL (%) AVERAGE MARKS are calculated from the TOTAL (%) of practicals that students have a complete set of COMPONENT MARKS for, i.e. data for practicals where the student has one or more blank COMPONENT MARKS cells are excluded from these calculations.

2. Class Performance

This comprises of two elements:

• CLASS MARK DISTRIBUTION - A histogram displaying the distribution of the Average Practical Mark achieved by each student in the class. The value shown above each column indicates the number of students in that category.

• RANKINGS - A list displaying:
  • Your overall Level 4 Lab Ranking for this class (based on Average Practical Marks) - Only calculated for students who have a complete set of Component Marks for at least one practical.
  • Your Ranking for each practical (based on the Total % for the practical) that you have a complete set of Component Marks for.
  Note: If you do not wish to see your Rankings, please send an email from your University Account to the Lab Manager, requesting that this feature is disabled for you and including in the email your Student ID Number.

3. Feedback Statistics

This is a table listing (for each practical in the course) the minimum, average and maximum number of WORKING DAYS between Main Report submissions and feedback appearance. It also states the % of reports for which feedback was generated within ten WORKING DAYS of report submission. Note that WORKING DAYS are defined as term weekdays (i.e. excludes vacations, Bank Holidays and weekends).