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Through historically oriented critical discourse analysis this article considers how the messages regarding the purpose of higher education, as presented in prospectuses of four case study institutions, have been impacted by massification and marketisation in England between 1977 and 2018. The prospectuses of four higher education institutions of different status were analysed to trace how discourses relating to the value of an undergraduate degree could be identified in the prospectuses. The findings suggest that while the prospectuses presented multiple rationales as to why students should undertake degrees, there was a significant increase in focus on graduate transitions to employment and a parallel hollowing-out of information relating to course content. The study found that over the period the vocabularies drawn on to present the value of a degree have become homogenised, yet the rationales given for undertaking tertiary study became more numerous and complex, making diversity of institutional offers difficult for prospective students to differentiate.

This study considers and evaluates the implementation of two strategies to improve student engagement with assessment -- the provision of exemplars in conjunction with rubrics, and student co-construction of rubrics -- as, respectively, a supplement and an alternative to teacher-designed rubrics. It follows our 2016 finding that teacher-designed rubrics, alone, may not provide students with sufficient clarity and transparency about assessment tasks either before beginning the task or upon receiving feedback. The use of exemplars to support rubrics was found to be the more effective strategy, although the idea of student rubric co-construction was found to have some promise. A key contribution of this paper is that it suggests the importance of the affective dimensions of students' engagement with assessment.