Evaluating the Evaluator: Towards understanding Feed-back, Feed-up, and Feed-forward of Moroccan Doctorate Supervisors’ Reports

Abstract

Supervisor’s feedback is both a naysaying and a puzzling concern that has always tormented academics in higher education. Particularly, written feedback on pre-final or final versions of a submitted doctoral dissertation is indisputably the most significant step toward granting a doctoral student supervisee the right to defend his/her research project. It also constitutes a rich source on how students are to academically go about writing their dissertation and even go public as they are supposed to produce one or two articles before their vivas. The present research explores the written comments provided by supervisors on Moroccan doctorate supervisees’ dissertations. It principally focuses on both overall and in-text comments and whether they serve as feed-back to take corrective actions for the errors made, feed-up to focus on strategies to attain the academic goal, or feed-forward to be proactive and avoid disturbances that might affect the quality of the final work. A total of 40 supervisees from the English department at FLLA, Ibn Tofail University belonging to Language and Society Research Laboratory participated in the study. Data were collected using an online questionnaire through available Google forms platform. The results revealed that the total majority of supervisees tended to get a mixture of written remarks with a central focus on the quantity rather than on form. This is therefore a plus as to the agreement as well as the variance of the Moroccan supervisors in the use of these evaluation criteria while evaluating their supervisees’ doctoral dissertations targeting different types of feedback with a huge focus of the cyclicity of their utilization.