D640 Giving, Receiving and Incorporating Feedback, catalog number PWS 2100, is a three CU professional skills course in the WGU School of Business covering the whole feedback cycle: receiving it, iterating on it and providing it constructively. One catalog note worth knowing is that the Course Descriptions section prints the title with an extra comma, as Giving, Receiving, and Incorporating Feedback, so both forms are correct depending on where you are reading.
Why an easy sounding course gets returned
Nearly everybody arrives at PWS 2100 believing they already have this skill, and that belief is exactly what produces returned work. The course is not asking whether you are pleasant about criticism. It is asking whether you can demonstrate a repeatable method, applied to a real situation, with evidence of what changed as a result.
The word carrying the most weight in the title is incorporating. Receiving feedback gracefully and then doing nothing with it satisfies nothing. A submission that describes a conversation, records that the feedback was appreciated, and stops there has answered perhaps a third of what a rubric in this course is looking for. What completes it is the visible chain: the feedback, the decision you made about it, the change you made, and the evidence that the change had an effect.
The second reason work comes back is abstraction. Professional skills courses attract general writing about the importance of communication, and general writing cannot be scored. Specific writing can. The feedback you received on a particular piece of work, on a particular date, from a person in a particular role, and the two sentences of it you disagreed with, is scoreable material. A paragraph about how feedback drives growth is not.
Turning scored aspects into a section plan
WGU keeps the scoring detail inside your Course of Study rather than in the public catalog, so open the rubric first and count the aspects. Each is judged separately against a three point scale and each needs a 2 for the task to pass. Nothing averages, which means a moving reflection on receiving criticism does not compensate for a thin section on delivering it.
Give every scored aspect its own heading, worded close to the rubric's own nouns. Reflective courses tempt students into flowing narrative, and flowing narrative forces an evaluator to hunt for the sentence that answers an aspect. Headings remove that problem entirely.
The word budget, worked. Suppose your rubric shows six scored aspects and the directions call for roughly 1,600 words. Reserve 120 words for an opening that names the situation and 100 for a close that states what you would do differently. That leaves about 1,380, near 230 words per aspect. Then rebalance: take 40 words from each of the descriptive aspects and give the resulting 120 to the aspect covering how you incorporated the feedback, and another 60 to the aspect covering how you delivered it. Those two are where evidence lives. An aspect answered in 80 words is almost always a claim with no example attached, which is the single most common return reason in professional skills courses.
A structure that fits a feedback deliverable
Where your task directions specify a structure, that structure wins. Where they do not, this arrangement maps onto how feedback aspects tend to be written.
| Section | What belongs in it | How it gets read |
|---|---|---|
| Situation | The work, the people, the stakes and the date, in a paragraph | Sets whether everything after it can be believed |
| Feedback received | What was actually said, close to verbatim, including the uncomfortable part | Sanitised feedback is obvious and undermines the whole submission |
| Your response in the moment | What you felt, what you said, what you asked for | Clarifying questions asked are strong evidence of skill |
| Evaluation of the feedback | Which parts you accepted, which you set aside, and the reasoning for both | Accepting everything reads as compliance rather than judgment |
| Action taken | The specific change made, with before and after visible | The aspect the course is named for; vague action fails it |
| Feedback you gave | A real instance, the method used, and how the other person responded | Scored for method rather than for tone |
| What you would change | One concrete adjustment to your own practice | Generic self improvement statements score nothing |
Keep the uncomfortable feedback in. A submission where every piece of feedback was minor and every response was gracious describes a situation with nothing at stake, and there is nothing in it for a rubric to reward.
Evidence craft when the evidence is a conversation
The hardest thing about professional skills courses is that your evidence is ephemeral. Building it into something scoreable takes deliberate habits.
- Write down feedback within a day of receiving it, in the giver's words rather than your summary of them. Paraphrase drifts towards flattery.
- Keep the artefact that was reviewed, and the version that followed. A before and after pair is the strongest single piece of evidence available in this course.
- Date everything. A sequence of events with dates is credible; the same sequence without them reads as reconstruction.
- Record what you asked, not just what you were told. Questions are visible skill.
- Cite the models you use. Established frameworks for structuring feedback are published work, and naming a source lifts a reflective paper noticeably.
- Use APA for anything external, and keep quotation of colleagues brief and anonymised where the directions call for it.
The habit that separates strong submissions is recording the feedback you rejected along with your reason. It demonstrates judgment rather than compliance, and it gives you a genuine argument to make in a course where most writing is agreeable.
What separates Competent from a submission sent back
Aspects are scored independently, so returns here are usually narrow: one section that describes rather than evidences.
- Every claim about your behaviour has an example with a date attached.
- The action taken is specific enough that someone could verify it happened.
- Feedback you gave is reported with the other person's reaction, not just your intent.
- At least one piece of feedback is evaluated critically rather than simply accepted.
- The closing commitment names one behaviour and one trigger, not a general aspiration.
Performance assessment work at WGU can be revised and resubmitted without a grade penalty, so a return is a delay rather than a mark against you. The cost is calendar, and in a six month flat rate term calendar is the entire budget. A three CU professional skills course that takes six weeks because of two returns is a course that displaced something else.
Six mistakes that cost time in D640
- Choosing a situation with nothing at stake. Feedback about a minor formatting preference gives you nothing to analyse.
- Sanitising what was said. Softened feedback removes exactly the material the rubric wants you to work with.
- Describing feelings instead of decisions. Reaction is one aspect; the decision that followed is the one that carries weight.
- Accepting every point uncritically. Agreement without evaluation reads as avoidance rather than as openness.
- Writing about feedback in general. The abstract paragraph is the most common filler in professional skills courses and it scores nothing.
- No evidence of change. The course is named for incorporating, and a submission with no before and after has skipped the centre of it.
Building a feedback method you can actually describe
The strongest submissions in this course are the ones where the student has a method rather than an attitude, because a method can be described, applied and evaluated, and an attitude cannot.
For receiving, a workable method has four steps. Listen without composing a defence, which is harder than it sounds and worth admitting. Ask two clarifying questions before responding, aimed at the specific rather than the general: what would a better version have looked like, and which part mattered most. Restate what you heard, so the giver can correct a misunderstanding before it becomes a wasted revision. Then take a defined pause before deciding what to act on, because immediate agreement and immediate resistance are both unreliable.
For giving, the method needs to separate three things that people routinely conflate: the observation, the effect and the request. The observation is what happened, described so specifically that it could be disputed on facts. The effect is the consequence, stated in terms of the work rather than of your feelings about the person. The request is what you would like next time, phrased as a behaviour rather than as a trait. Someone can change a behaviour by Thursday. Nobody can change a trait on request.
Write the method down before you write the reflection. A submission that names its own method, applies it to a real instance, and then evaluates where the method worked and where it did not, satisfies several aspects at once and reads as professional rather than as earnest.
How support works on this course
Send the rubric from your Course of Study and the task directions. What comes back is aspect mapped: a structure that puts each scored aspect under its own heading, prompts that pull the specific detail out of your own experience, and revision support that turns description into evidence. The situations and the reflection have to be genuinely yours, because they are the only part a rubric cannot be faked past.
D640 is short and easy to underestimate. Terms run six months at a flat rate, so closing the professional skills courses quickly leaves the term free for the heavier ones.
Questions students ask about D640
Is D640 the same course as PWS 2100?
What if I do not currently work anywhere?
Can you write the reflection for me?
Where D640 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 3 current WGU programs. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.