9.2 Incorporating the Feedback on the First Draft

Feedback Comes in Two Flavors: Required and Recommended — Be Sure to Understand the Difference!

Whether your supervisor —and any other person you ask for comments on your first draft— is giving you feedback orally or in writing, you had better take careful note of

• what they are suggesting
• how they are suggesting it.

Students I supervise often ask me for a meeting to discuss their paper, after they have given me a draft. The advantage of asking for a meeting is that it sets a deadline for the supervisor. The supervisor has to finish reading and get ready to give feedback for the meeting or it will be embarrassing to admit that she did not do what she was supposed to and promised to do. However, I often find that I am less organized in giving my feedback orally than if I had to write to the student. More importantly, I am often amazed that the student just sits there and nods and promises to do this or that without taking any notes. Unsurprisingly, the final or the next draft often comes in with only some but not all of the issues taken care of and no explanations as to why some things were not done. Obviously, the student did not disagree for good reasons with some of my remarks but simply could not remember them. Such an approach is not only ineffective, it is also disrespectful.

Here is what you should do instead:

• if your supervisor has limited availability, ask whether she would prefer to give her comments in writing;
• if you meet and discuss the paper face-to-face, be sure to take careful notes;
• after the meeting, send an e-mail to the supervisor along the following lines:

Important...

There are different kinds of feedback. First there are changes you may have to make to your paper that are absolutely required to get the paper accepted or to get a passing grade. These usually concern factual or formal mistakes of some significance. This kind of feedback is objective. You would get similar feedback from pretty much every other supervisor as well, at least from people at your academic institution who work on the same level and with the same formal parameters. Such feedback is not optional, you have to make the changes, whether you like them or not.

Second, there is subjective feedback from your supervisor, things she does not like about your paper or things she considers desirable because adding them would make your paper stronger. In this regard, we have to acknowledge that different supervisors would give quite different feedback. One person likes what another person does not like about your paper. One person thinks you should also discuss X, Y and Z, while another person thinks it would be a distraction from your main arguments. 

With subjective feedback, you need to make a strategic decision:

• You agree and, therefore, you will make the changes;
• You agree that the changes would be desirable but for other reasons —in particular lack of time— you would rather not or you simply cannot make the changes;
• You do not agree that the changes should be made because they would weaken or distract instead of strengthening your main thesis and the purpose of your paper. 

Obviously, if you would prefer not to make some of the recommended (but not strictly required) changes. This may have consequences for the evaluation of your paper and the question is, what would those consequences be?

• The supervisor will still accept the paper and give the anticipated grade (let's say an A- or and 8 out of 10). The main consequence is that you miss an opportunity to get an even higher grade.
• The supervisor will still accept the paper but lower the grade below what you (and her) anticipated (let's say a B instead of an A- or a 5 out of 10 instead of 8 out of 10). 
• The supervisor will not accept the paper, although a different supervisor at the same institution would accept it, since there are no objective factual or formal mistakes of significance.

In general, if you get feedback from the supervisor suggesting or requiring changes that you feel are not mandated by institutional requirements and rather based on personal (= subjective) preferences of the supervisor and you have reasons for not wanting to make those changes, I suggest that you pursue the following course of action:

• Make an appointment for a face-to-face discussion and explain your reasons why you tend to disagree with some of the feedback and would rather be inclined not to incorporate all of it; be sure to start the conversation on a positive note by thanking the supervisor for her valuable feedback and expressing your appreciation for the valuable advice on issues 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6, and assuring the supervisor that you are already working on them. (This is a case where an actual meeting —versus e-mail communication— is of great value because you get not only the factual information but also the body language and the way the facts are delivered to see whether the supervisor feels strongly about them or may be persuaded otherwise.)
• Ask for the particular reasons why the supervisor would also like for you to make the changes under #4 because you are not sure that you entirely understand them.
• If you still disagree, try to make your case, politely but clearly. Your own reasons should ideally be based on the subject matter itself and how the thesis and the paper can be most effectively argued and presented. However, objective personal reasons, such as deadlines or other time consuming obligations, are also acceptable reasons for declining labor-intensive additional work on a paper that may be beneficial but not essential.
• Ideally, if you can persuade the supervisor that the paper does not really benefit from the suggested changes and that those points might better be addressed in a future paper or publication, you should get the full mark.
• If you have to decline suggested changes for objective but personal reasons, it may affect your grade and you have to ask to what extent this may be the case and decide whether you can live with those consequences.
• However, in the rare case that you strongly believe that you have good and objective reasons of substance to disagree with some of the supervisor's recommendations and she cannot be persuaded to accept your reasons, you should actually stand by your work. You have spent months and countless hours to come to your conclusions and if the supervisor cannot persuade you on the merits that you are wrong in a specific aspect of your paper, there is at least a chance that you are right and she is wrong.
• For the latter case, I suggest that you de-escalate the situation in the meeting by saying that you need to think about the matter some more and that you will get back to the supervisor with a response after a day or two (a week or two for larger projects). Then you should get a second opinion, maybe even a third opinion, ideally from another faculty member or (potential) supervisor who has already been involved on the margins or is otherwise somewhat familiar with your research or at least the subject you are working on.
• If a second or third opinion confirms that the supervisor may be right, you have to accept that in spite of all your time and effort, you are still rather new to the subject and don't have the same level of knowledge and experience as the supervisor. Thus, you get back to her and let her know that you now agree and will make the suggested changes.
• However, if a second and third opinion confirm that the matter is at least ambiguous or even that you are right and the supervisor is wrong, you should check whether your institution has procedures to protect students from unfair assessments by their academic advisors or supervisors. Such procedures may consist of a total switch of supervisor or at least a third party review of the paper and the assessment of the supervisor. Of course, this should be a remedy of last resort because it is likely to poison the relationship with the original supervisor in a way that cannot be overcome. On the other hand, you may gain a new supporter who was not (much) aware of your work before but has now become a fan.