Providing guidelines for first year assessment tasks as a means of developing core graduate attributes: nurturing or spoon feeding?

Developing written and oral communication skills is an impot1ant part of the first-year university experience as this is the time to set the tone and standards for later years. This paper will describe the rationale for providing thorough instructions, desired learning outcomes, and assessment criteria to firstyear students enrolled in a core business subject - with the objective of guiding students into deep approaches to learning.