Case Study: Marking, Feedback, and Assessment in the Farah x BA Menswear Project
The Farah x BA Menswear project was a 10-week industry collaboration requiring students to develop a brand identity, conceptualize a corresponding capsule collection, and build a narrative with an understanding of the brand’s history. A significant challenge in this project was ensuring that students engaged with formative assessment and feedback crits throughout the project, rather than focusing solely on the final summative submission in week 10. In creative BA degrees, students often undervalue formative feedback, viewing the final grade/submission as the primary measure of success. This imbalance can limit opportunities for improvement and hinder engagement with the iterative design process, which is critical to industry practice.
The assessment structure for this project followed a traditional model, where students received formative feedback during interim critiques, tutorials, and presentations before a final summative submission. While feedback was provided throughout the unit, its impact was often limited, as some students did not actively integrate it into their development process or did not attend at all.
To address this, the project trialled a structured feedback loop, ensuring that formative assessments aligned directly with the intended learning outcomes. This included:
- Midpoint group critiques with written feedback that were attended by the creative team from Farah.
- Tutor feedback on design and research development, emphasizing formative feedback points as important and not to be missed.
- Industry feedback from Farah representatives at key stages to offer real-world perspectives.
Despite these interventions, some students still missed/did not engage with formative feedback, focusing more on the final grade and submission alone. This suggests that the assessment weighting and structure may require further refinement to encourage deeper engagement with feedback as an ongoing process rather than a discrete event.
Moving Forward
Constructive Alignment: Constructive alignment involves designing teaching and assessment activities that directly align with the intended learning outcomes, ensuring that students engage in learning activities that lead to achieving those outcomes. To ensure feedback is integral to student success, future iterations of the project should embed formative assessment more explicitly within the summative grading criteria. One approach is to introduce a reflective component in the final submission, requiring students to demonstrate how they have engaged with and applied feedback received throughout the project.
The very ways in which work is handed back can reinforce students’ negative thinking that each piece of work is ‘done now’ and no longer relevant to learning. The ‘why bother’ attitude is the instrumental/superficial approach to learning that we as tutors tend to deplore.
Brooks, K. (2008) ‘“Could do better?”: students’ critique of written feedback’, Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 7(2)
I question if this is adding more work to the final submission or if this reflective journal could have a useful, cumulative approach to the student’s process and practice, reflecting on formative points every couple of weeks and submitting their reflections could allow for a deeper understanding of the process.
perhaps instead of this reflective written element becoming part of a final submission this could also be cumulative, creating 4 formative pieces of reflective writing across a ten-week project that are submitted as the project moves forward to show a student has engaged with and understands each “section” of learning within the project.
Building on my insights into assessment patterns above, the project in future could benefit from a more distributed model of assessment. This could involve:
- Graded milestone submissions (e.g., initial brand concept, research portfolio, design development) to reinforce the importance of formative stages.
- Breaking the project into smaller sub-projects and marking these elements in different or varying ways, verbal, written, silent crit etc.
- Peer-review elements, where students provide structured feedback(how to facilitate this is a major open question which needs more reflection in another blog post) to each other before receiving tutor input, foster a culture of critique and reflection.
- Mandatory participation in formative feedback sessions as a component of the final grade, ensuring that feedback is valued as part of the assessment process.(Again further reflection is needed here as to the process of minor modification of a project brief or revaidation of the project to change the learning outcomes to include this element)
Reflection on Formative Assessment: Effective formative assessment involves using feedback to inform future work. Embedding a reflective requirement—such as a design log or feedback response journal—could help students track their progress and articulate how they have implemented critique. This approach enhances learning and mirrors industry practices where designers must iterate and refine their work based on feedback from the creative director or head of studio.
There is strong evidence that feedback
Ivanic et al., 2000; Higgins et al., 2001
messages are invariably complex and difficult to decipher, and that students require
opportunities to construct actively an understanding of them (e.g. through discussion) before they can be used to regulate performance .
By refining the marking, feedback, and assessment structure in future iterations of this range development unit (which may have different industry partners in the future), we can better align assessment with learning outcomes, ensuring students actively engage with formative feedback and view it as a key driver of their creative and professional development.
References:
Nicol, D.J. and Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006) ‘Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice’, Studies in Higher Education, 31(2), pp. 199–218.
Brooks, K. (2008) ‘“Could do better?”: students’ critique of written feedback’, Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 7(2)
Broadfoot, P. (1996) Education, assessment and society: A sociological analysis. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Ivanic et al., 2000:
Ivanic, R., Clark, R. and Rimmershaw, R. (2000) ‘What am I supposed to make of this? The messages conveyed to students by tutors’ written comments’, in Lea, M.R. and Stierer, B. (eds.) Student writing in higher education: new contexts. Buckingham: Open University Press, pp. [page numbers if available].
Higgins et al., 2001:
Higgins, R., Hartley, P. and Skelton, A. (2001) ‘Getting the message across: the problem of communicating assessment feedback’, Teaching in Higher Education, 6(2), pp. 269–274.
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