Providing guidelines for the first-year assessment tasks as a means of developing core graduate attributes: Nurturing or spoonfeeding?

Developing written and oral skills is an important part of 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 through instructions, desired learning outcomes, and assessment criteria to first year students enrolled in a core business subject - with the objective of guiding students into deep approaches to learning.