Your WGU performance assessment came back. Now what?

What a return actually means

Not that your work was bad. Usually that one aspect of the rubric was not explicitly addressed. WGU's model has no partial credit and no overall score, so a submission that is strong on five aspects and silent on the sixth produces the same outcome as one that is weak throughout: revise and resubmit.

Omission, not weakness, is the most common cause. Experienced nurses are particularly prone to it, because they answer the underlying clinical question rather than the rubric aspect in front of them.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Rewriting the whole thing. One aspect was flagged; the other five already cleared. A full rewrite wastes days and occasionally introduces a new problem in a section that had already passed.

Open the comments, find the aspect, fix that, leave the rest alone.

If the comments are unclear

Take them to your course instructor — the subject specialist for that course — not to your programme mentor and not back to the evaluator. Evaluators are anonymous and do not enter a dialogue. The instructor can tell you what the aspect is actually asking for and has seen the same confusion many times.

How to make the next one clear first time

• Write against the rubric structure. Paste the aspects into your document as headings and answer each in turn. Remove the headings at the end if you prefer.
• Say the thing explicitly. If an aspect asks you to identify stakeholders, the word "stakeholders" should appear with a list under it. An evaluator cannot award what you implied.
• Check the mechanical requirements last. Source currency, file format, length. Easy fails and entirely preventable.

Keep it in proportion

Nurses arriving from graded programmes often take a return badly, because everywhere else "returned" means "not good enough". Here it means "one box unticked". The nurses who move fastest treat it as an administrative round trip, fix the aspect the same week, and resubmit without ceremony.