I always got very personal and descriptive statements from my teachers on my report cards:
Perhaps a negative effect of increased computerisation?
I remember that at the time I started my secondary school in the early 90's, the reports took the form of an individual A5 page for every subject, 90% of which was available (and more often than not, used to the full) for the teacher to write (yes, write, in longhand, with a pen) a fairly descriptive overview of your performance. There were then other similar pages for your form tutor and head of year to write their comments too (and we had to write our own statements about how we thought school was going for reasons I've never worked out). The whole thing when assembled had about 15 pages in it and took quite a bit of reading, and thus provided a very complete, personally written picture of your performance.
When I finally left the establishment 7 years later, reports had been slimmed down to a single A4 sheet, mainly consisting of 10-15 different categories on which you could be graded, and with a small box for comments which I later found out were pre-written comments pulled out of a statement bank.
I know which format I think was better...