The wider context of arts and humanities education in the UK has demanded that university teachers and administrators focus on ‘end points’. Increased emphasis on the generic and transferable skills attained through arts and humanities programmes, along with intense concern to raise students’ reported levels of satisfaction, do not necessarily help university teachers to make the best use of the expanding body of research on how students actually learn from assessment and feedback. This article focuses not on the final-year students, whose views are increasingly solicited in satisfaction surveys, but on two cohorts of first-year History students as they write their first essays and have their first experiences of feedback in a research-intensive institution. The article explores at a micro-level some of the factors which earlier research has identified as critical to the development of assessment and feedback practices which are conducive to students’ self-regulation and future learning.