Feedback
What it really means
The written comments markers give with your grade, explaining strengths and weaknesses. Use it for the next assignment — and it is fine to ask the marker to explain it in office hours.
Context, tips & common mistakes
UK academic feedback is blunt about weaknesses by design — comments target the work's gaps because that is what improves the next piece, and a page of critique on a 65 essay is engagement, not hostility. Students from praise-forward cultures often read normal British feedback as failure; recalibrate by reading the mark against the marking scale (a 65 is a solid 2:1) and the comments as the route to a 70.
Use it forward: the criticisms of essay one are the private marking scheme for essay two, and markers notice — and reward — visible response to previous feedback. Where comments are cryptic ('needs more critical analysis'), office hours exist precisely for 'could you show me what that would look like in this paragraph?'. What office hours are not for is renegotiating the mark: academic judgement is not appealable, only procedural errors are — accepting that early saves a lot of unproductive indignation.
Example conversation
What you could say back
No spoken reply needed for this one.