They did absolutely nothing with the feedback

I teach a lab course with a big final report that uses data collected over several weeks. This report is so important that I built in a week where students are required to turn in a rough draft, I give them feedback, and then they turn in their final report. I use LMS stuff to make the feedback super easy on my end, so it doesn't take a huge amount of time to review, but the students received feedback directly from me.

Last week, I got the final reports back. They improved nothing. Some students even took out entire (required) sections of the lab report and put raw data BACK into the final report when it wasn't there in the draft. This assignment expects students to do data analysis and put charts and graphs in, not scanned/photographed pages of their lab notebook. It's explicitly stated several times and I said it out loud.

I'll be honest, I've really been struggling this spring. But seeing this proof that none of the feedback I gave was actually useful or helpful and only served to take up a little bit of my time, is really disheartening. *It's not that fucking hard*. The rubric lays out exactly what I want to see, in the exact order I want to see it. We had a week where all we did was make graphs of their data in the exact format I wanted for the final report and a significant number of students simply ... did not include these.

This makes me not want to bother with rough drafts or feedback in future courses. Admittedly, it is even faster to grade the final reports now, because I'm not going to give specific feedback this time, just points. But I don't think anything I've done has helped any of my students' technical writing or scientific literacy here.