Don’t Water Down Feedback to Your Students

I recently had an instructor ask whether the feedback he was about to provide to a student was too harsh. He said the student’s writing was a mess and that there was no way that the student would make it through their program without writing help. Thus, he proposed to tell them the following on their assignment: “Please contact the academic success center. They are experts at working with new graduate students to better organize assignment responses. Working with them will make your academic experience much better.”