Student access to automated marking tools as a way of improving their comprehension

Feedback, on both a summative and formative basis, is a critical component of modern teaching. At the same time as institutional expectations on quality and volume of feedback grow, learner expectations of turnaround times also become increasingly hard to meet, especially in large cohorts. One approach is to provide automatic feedback which can be applied on a formative basis or to support summative marking. To support learner experience on one large module a version of the automated summative marking system was provided on a formative basis to learners throughout their project offering a representative subset of all the marking criteria used and detailed feedback on errors found in submission. This tool has been offered over two student cohort years, 2018 and 2019, and been widely used by the learners. In 2019 there were a total of 13,141 unique submissions to the tool from at least 312 individuals (of 362 enrolled). Feedback from both learners and academic staff has been very positive, helping both pro-active problem solving and domain knowledge in the learners while reducing workload for staff, showing the approach has been highly effective in this domain.