As we near the final stretch of the semester, the trees are finally blooming, yes — but so are the inboxes. Graded papers, returned exams and prelim results morph into final reminders. Feedback is flying, and with it comes a surge of quiet reckoning. Students are calculating paths forward. Faculty are bracing for the final push. And amid all this movement lies one of the most delicate, unpredictable and easily misunderstood parts of university life: feedback.
Last fall, a student came to office hours looking uneasy. They had just received their first paper back. “I saw your comments,” they said, pausing. “I know it probably means I’m not cut out for this.” It didn’t. My comments — about structure, clarity and argument — were meant to help refine their ideas, not reject them. But I knew what they were hearing, because I have heard it in my own head. In the quiet space between what a professor writes and what a student reads, a whole story can form. Often, it’s a harsher one than either side intends. That’s the strange thing about feedback: It’s meant to be a bridge, but it can feel like a verdict.
I distinctly remember a moment from my last year of college at the Sorbonne. I had spent weeks on a history paper — researching, drafting, revising late into the night. I turned it in with that nervous feeling of having done something that mattered to me. When the professor — someone I still admire deeply for her intellect — returned the papers in front of everyone, she made a sharp comment to each student as she handed them back. Then she got to mine. Without looking at me, she dropped it on the table and said, “I never give an 18 out of 20 (equivalent to an A+). Now I had to.”
It was meant as praise. And yet I felt exposed, like I’d broken a rule I didn’t know existed. Once I started teaching myself, I came to understand that this was an entrenched ritual of French academia — public criticism is considered more formative than private encouragement, and praise is often viewed with suspicion. But in that moment, what stayed with me was the tone. Feedback, even when it’s positive, can distort when it’s not delivered with care. So here’s something I need to say clearly: Feedback is not a final judgment, but an invitation. And more often than not, it’s written with far more hope than students imagine.
From the professor’s side, feedback is often written at odd hours — between classes, while traveling or late at night with a mug of tea (I only recently kicked a nasty Coke Zero habit). It tries to balance encouragement with honesty, clarity with kindness. We want to help, but words often arrive detached from tone or context. And by the time a student reads them, they’re sitting alone, trying to translate what it all means for them. Not all feedback is well-crafted: Sometimes we miss the mark. But most of the time, we write those comments hoping you’ll see what we saw: the potential, the idea just beneath the surface, the sentence that almost worked and could still open something up.
Over time, I’ve learned — slowly, imperfectly — that feedback isn’t just an academic tool, but an emotional exchange. Many not only hear what is said; they also hear what they already fear. And professors, though we rarely admit it, carry fears too — that our comments will come across as careless, or too sharp, or too vague to be useful. And there are even deeper emotional layers. Students who are the first in their families to attend college, or those navigating feelings of impostor syndrome, may experience even well-meaning suggestions as confirmation that they don’t belong. That’s why transparency, warmth and follow-up matter — not just in how we assess work, but in how we talk about it.
Research backs this up. A meta-analysis of over 800 educational studies found that feedback — when done well — has one of the strongest impacts on learning. The average effect size? An astonishing 0.73. That means feedback, more than almost any other intervention, can make a real difference.
That’s also why professors benefit from feedback. This time of the academic year is a good time to ask: What has worked, and what has not? What would help you all learn better? Students notice when we listen. And when we model how to receive critique without defensiveness, we teach more than content — we teach how to learn.
That exchange, when done thoughtfully, can be transformational. It’s a reminder that feedback is not just something we give but something we practice. And it never really ends. Most of what I do now, as a professor, is shaped by feedback — from peer reviewers and editors to colleagues. I revise lectures, rewrite articles and get turned down, more often than not. My colleague Johannes Haushofer, now a professor in the Department of Economics and the Brooks School of Public Policy, published a “CV of Failures” back in 2016—a move that was, at the time, revolutionary. Much of my own job has been a process of learning not to take rejection personally — of realizing that it’s not me being rejected, but an argument not fully spelled out, a sentence that didn’t land, a framing that needs more work. As a student, I thought feedback had a finish line. As a professor, I now know that it does not. It is a feature of how ideas grow. We teach that, too, when we invite revision, when we admit that learning is iterative. Feedback, at its best, is a conversation.
If you’ve received feedback that hurt, I hope you’ll bring it in. Not just the paragraph or the comment — but the feeling: the uncertainty, the disappointment, the sense of being quietly crushed. Sometimes the best conversations start there. After all, feedback is not the end of the story: It’s only the beginning.
Jan Burzlaff is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program for Jewish Studies. Office Hours (Open Door Edition) is his weekly dispatch to the Cornell community — a professor’s reflections on teaching, learning and the small moments that make a campus feel human. Readers can submit thoughts and questions anonymously through the Tip Sheet here. He can also be reached at profjburzlaff@cornellsun.com.
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Jan Burzlaff is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program for Jewish Studies. Office Hours (Open Door Edition) is his weekly dispatch to the Cornell community — a professor’s reflections on teaching, learning, and the small moments that make a campus feel human. Readers can submit thoughts and questions anonymously through the Tip Sheet here. He can also be reached at profjburzlaff@cornellsun.com.