Students' Experiences of Assessment Feedback: Perspectives from a Higher Education Institution in South Africa

This paper presents the findings of a study that explored students' experiences of assessment feedback at Mangosuthu University of Technology (MUT) in South Africa using a phenomenological approach. The qualitative study collected data using a questionnaire that was administered to sample of 200 second and third year students at the Faculty of Management Sciences before purposively selecting ten students from four different departments for in-depth interviews. The findings revealed that written tests were the dominant form of assessment tasks, a mark without comments was the dominant form of feedback; while students appreciated the value of feedback, the quality of the comments, where provided, was poor; and feedback was not promptly given. Given these findings, the paper provides some recommendations to help improve assessment feedback at MUT.