There are some potential problems, though, in terms of student anxiety – it seems to make people worry when I comment a lot; the actual mark at the moment calms some of this worry down. But it’s a concept I’ll play around with…

On your experience of people trying to give everyone the same grade, etc.: I’ve seen things like this, as well. I’ve always wondered whether this approach might have something to do with a sort of fundamental confusion over terms within the psychological literature, where a literature on the problems that can arise when someone fails to develop an adequate “sense of self”, has somehow become confused with the more popular concept of whether someone has developed a positive self-feeling, or self esteem…

Failure to develop a sense of self – to distinguish between self and others, to form object relations, etc. – would certainly be likely to have terrible psychological consequences. This doesn’t really have anything to do with self-esteem, however: one can have a strong sense of self, and low self-esteem, etc.

So I suspect the pedagogical strategy may be a response to a misplaced fear – but I’ll admit I’ve never tracked back to make sure. Whatever the historical origins, my understanding is that, empirically, the case for marking everyone equally, etc., is quite weak… And, in any event, I’d think that demonstrating to a student that they can do something quite difficult, even after initial failed attempts, would boost “self esteem” more than a fake mark…

Apologies if this is confusing – I’ve had to be something of a sleep minimalist this week…

This–in theory–is easy. Deliver your comment separately first, without the grade you have given.

Don’t know about Australia but at my uni instructors that give students a detailed and honest feedback are rare. Much too rare.
Plus, theres this silly paedagogic paradigm that forbids to articulate any kind of negative feedback in order to not discourage the students which actually makes a number of bad loops. Students don’t learn to cope with honest criticism and in consequence avoid to take classes given by the few lecturers who do point to the weaknesses of student’s text directly and clearly. Concerning the former, I ve gone through classes wherein even grading itself was driven ad absurdum by every student receiving the same grade. Mean, you don’t have to give grades at all this way because they just don’t express anything except the lecturers’ convictions in regards of education practices and politics (which I don’t share). The worst case happened when I in a class received quite positive feedback by the lecturer whom I valued highly for his intellect and later was told by fellow students he had noted that the piece of work he earlier commented on positively actually was inacceptable. I felt betrayed because the A I received was not worth the paper it was written on.
Another example is a case when I wrote a research proposal that was nothing than ridiculous and non-conductable and the lecturers’ (another than mentioned above ) comment said, we were making “good effort”.
My last-mohicaine strategy of waiting until certain honest and truely critical professors offer classes in obligatory sections takes time that ordinary students won’t be able to invest in their schooling anymore within our current education reform in Germany–even if they wanted to.

In teaching my lit classes, I find I’m reacting against my own methods-obsessed education, which left little room for joy. I am very glad, in retrospect, that I spent so much time doing interesting research and writing quasi-theoretical papers as an undergrad, but I don’t remember having much of a chance to live with those texts in harmony before eviscerating them. It may seem silly, but I like to allow for at least five minutes of “What’s worthwhile about this text?” before we go stomping all over it.

And for what it’s worth, I think students prefer too much feedback over too little. It’s always nice to see teachers take a lot of time to give genuine feedback rather than generic comments like “Try harder” or “Good job.”