Naomi Winstone

Higher education practice is increasingly shaped by expanding workloads and cultures of acceleration. These pressures are felt acutely in the domain of assessment. As marking cycles shorten, deadlines proliferate, and institutional metrics dominate academic time, assessment risks becoming a site of temporal strain rather than pedagogical care. This paper deploys the concept of arrhythmia as a metaphor for the increasingly fragmented, rushed, and disjointed nature of assessment in higher education. Drawing on contemporary challenges in academic practice, we argue that assessment has lost its pedagogical rhythm, becoming governed by institutional workload clocks rather than learning-centred temporalities. Engaging Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, we identify three interrelated symptoms of assessment arrhythmia: unsustainable acceleration and pace; temporal surveillance; and temporal dissonance within modularised curricula. We respond to these conditions by proposing a series of recommendations aimed at restoring more relational, integrated, and temporally aligned approaches to assessment. In doing so, we demonstrate how rhythmanalysis offers a generative framework for rethinking assessment practices and for resisting the culture of speed and intensification that pervades contemporary higher education.

Although feedback was traditionally viewed as a one-way transfer of information from teacher to student, with the student being a passive recipient, this perspective is now seen as overly teacher-c...

This study investigated the impact of a flipped feedback approach on student academic performance and evaluative judgement. Flipped feedback involved providing generic feedback information on common errors before students self-assessed against the marking criteria and requested targeted feedback. Undergraduate students completed two coursework assignments featuring flipped feedback. Draft and final submission scores were compared, and students completed an evaluation survey. Results showed substantial gains between draft and final submission scores. Survey responses were overwhelmingly positive, with most students agreeing that flipped feedback aided self-evaluation and subject comprehension. However, some expressed concerns about self-assessment accuracy and draft/final weighting. This study indicated that flipped feedback can empower learners to engage with and act upon the feedback process while increasing academic performance compared to previous cohorts by enhancing evaluative judgement. Further research should systematically investigate the approach’s potential across diverse subjects and assessment modalities.