How to Get a First

The Essential Guide to Academic Success

Thomas Dixon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415317320
• eBook ISBN: 9781134371310
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this informative guide, Thomas Dixon argues that you do not have to be a genius to get a first at university. He sets out to de-mystify first-class degrees in the arts, humanities and social sciences, clearly articulating the difference between the excellent and the merely competent in undergraduate work.

This concise, no-nonsense guidebook will give prospective and current students advice on teaching and learning styles that prevail in university and on how to manage their two most important resources - their time and their lecturers. In an accessible and entertaining style, the author looks at subjects such as:

• making the transition from school to university
• developing transferable skills
• making use of lectures and seminars
• using libraries and the Internet
• note-taking, essays, seminars and presentations
• common mistakes to avoid
• writing with clarity and style
• revision and examinations.

Illustrated with many examples from a range of academic disciplines, How to Get a First is an all-purpose guide to success in academic life. Visit the companion website www.getafirst.com

Chapter 1

Introduction

Summary

Read this book before you get to university! Be prepared for the differences between teaching and learning at university and at school. You don’t have to be a genius to get a first in your university degree. You do need to understand the tasks, acquire the right skills and spend plenty of time practising them. If you can learn to read actively and selectively, think clearly and creatively, and to speak and write in plain English, you will be able to excel at university.

One in 10

Roughly speaking, out of every 10 students who graduate from a UK university each year, only one comes out with a first-class degree. About five get an upper second, three a lower second, and the remaining one gets either a third-class or an unclassified degree.¹ How to Get a First is about how to maximise your chances of being in the top 10 per cent, rather than in the middle 80 per cent or the bottom 10 per cent. It is about the difference between competent academic work and excellent academic work.

Who is this book for?

This book is for prospective and current undergraduate students working towards a degree in any subject in which attending lectures and seminars, giving presentations, reading books and articles, doing research in libraries and on the internet, writing assessed written work and taking examinations are key components. I expect those who will find this book most useful will be students working towards degrees in the arts, humanities and social sciences, in subjects such as English literature, history, sociology, modern languages, economics, politics, American studies, anthropology, archaeology, classics, geography, history of art, law, media studies, music, philosophy, psychology, religious studies and theology.

Since the advice I offer below is applicable across such a wide range of subjects, I have endeavoured, in what follows, to use examples from a suitably wide range of disciplines. Despite this endeavour, it is possible that you might still be able to discern the influence of my own particular experience teaching courses on the history and philosophy of science, and on theology and religious studies. You may also detect the influence of my special interest in British intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I mention this at the outset just in case you find yourself wondering, for example, about all the references to David Hume and Charles Darwin. I have tried to balance references to my own pet subjects with references to examples taken from a wide range of other disciplines and from other times and places.

How to Get a First contains advice relating to all the most important aspects of academic life, which will be relevant and helpful no matter what your aspirations. There is a particular emphasis, however, on how to excel at university. So, if you are hoping to get a first-class degree (or at least give it your best shot), are wondering what skills are involved and whether you have them, and want to know how best to spend the available time in order to achieve your goal, then this book is for you: it aims to demystify the first-class degree and explain how you can go about getting one, from your first day at university onwards.

The best time to read How to Get a First is before you even get to university. Then you will arrive at university with your eyes open and with a clear idea of the challenges ahead and how to meet them most effectively. It will also equip you to know what to expect from your lecturers and tutors. If you have had a gap year between school and university, reading this book will be a particularly helpful way to re-engage with the academic world before starting your course. Whether or not you have had a gap year, it will help to prepare you for some of the differences between the teaching and learning styles that are most prevalent at university and those with which you are familiar from school.

Finally, I also hope that this book will be helpful to secondary-school teachers who are responsible for providing guidance and advice to A-level students preparing to make the transition to university. It will perhaps provide a helpful glimpse of some of the attitudes, values and teaching styles that their students will encounter at university.

What is this book for?

This book is to help you improve your academic performance by asking yourself basic but important questions such as ‘How can I get more out of my classes and lectures?’, ‘How could I improve my academic writing style?’, ‘Could I save time by reading books and articles more efficiently?’ and ‘How can I make sure I feel confident and prepared when I go into my exams?’. I hope this book will help you realise the following:

• You do not have to be a genius to get a first.
• What constitutes first-class academic work can be clearly specified - it is not mysterious.
• The keys to success are understanding the task and managing your resources.
• The central task is persuasion, using the tools of logical argument and relevant evidence.
• Your two most important resources are your time and your lecturers.
• The whole system is set up to help you succeed - all you need to do is co-operate.
• Thinking clearly and writing clearly are two sides of the same coin: academic writing should not be complicated, abstract or jargonistic.

I also hope that this book will serve as a sort of all-purpose companion to your academic studies. It contains thoughts and advice relating to all aspects of your work. You will probably find it helpful to read the book once straight through (which should not take long – it is an easy read), and then refer back to specific sections when the time comes in due course to focus on a particular element in the range of academic activities, such as planning an essay, giving a presentation, or revising for exams.

What is this book not?

This is not an academic book. It does not draw on educational research and theory, nor does it employ technical concepts from those areas. The writing style I adopt in this book is also, in some ways, non-academic. For instance, I make use of bullet-point lists; I use italics for extra emphasis in some places; I use chatty contractions such as ‘let’s’ and ‘don’t’; and I even use exclamation marks from time to time! All of these are things that you would not normally expect to find in academic writing. I have also used many more sub-headings to divide up the text than I would have done had I been writing an academic article or book. How to Get a First is, then, a non-academic book about academic life; it is a concise, no-nonsense guidebook for students, offering inside information on how to deal with the academic side of university life. Do as I say, not as I do in this book!

How to become an Olympic medal-winning gymnast

If you wanted to become an Olympic medal-winning gymnast, you would have to undertake a long and intensive training programme. You would need to learn unfamiliar skills and new physical movements of which you had known nothing before. You would think it rather odd if your trainer never introduced you to these new skills, nor told you how to perform those new movements, but instead would get you to come along once a week to perform a routine of your own invention and then simply say ‘No, that’s no good. Do a better routine next week.’ To excel at something you need to be told and shown what excellence involves, and instructed in how to go about trying to achieve it.

Too often, in the past, undergraduate students have been put in a position similar to that of the aspiring gymnast with the unhelpful coach – they were expected to excel academically at university but not given a clear picture of how to do so nor given enough guidance with respect to the new skills they needed to learn, and how these differed from what they were used to at school. This book is an attempt, based on my own experiences both as a student and, now, as a lecturer, to provide some guidance about the skills that you will need to develop in order to succeed academically. This is only a starting point. During the course of your own university career you will need to refine and polish these basic skills. There is, of course, no simple formula that can guarantee academic success, nor any set of rules which, if you read them and tried to follow them, could ensure that you would get a first. The advice and guidance contained in this book should, however, give you a good idea of what is required and help you maximise your chances of success.

Essay-writing, essay-writing, essay-writing

The training programme for your degree will probably have four main elements:

• Attending lectures, classes and seminars
• Reading books and articles
• Writing essays
• One-to-one or small-group tutorial contact with teaching staff.

The most important of these four elements is the third: writing essays.

Writing essays is difficult . . .

Essay-writing is the most underrated and underdeveloped, and yet the most important of academic skills. Too many people think that to do well at university you must simply go to lectures, read books, absorb the information and then reproduce it in assessed work and exam essays. This overlooks the crucial fact that writing an essay is not a simple matter of spilling onto the page all the ideas that you have ingested; rather, it is a difficult and highly skilled craft. Writing clearly and persuasively is only possible if you think clearly and understand the material you are dealing with. Writing well and thinking well go hand in hand. To do well at university you need to do both.

The aim, which is the goal to have in mind throughout your training programme, is to be able to produce grammatically correct, elegant, concise, well-informed, clear, logical, thought-provoking and persuasive essays.

In most arts and humanities degrees, you are assessed primarily by one criterion: your ability to produce good written work. (In some cases oral presentations will contribute to your marks, and in the case of degrees with a linguistic component, translations, orals and other language exercises will contribute a significant amount.) A proportion of this work is likely to be made up of essays written under quite stressful exam conditions. In short, to excel under this system you must be an excellent writer.

. . . but not that difficult

At the other end of the spectrum from those who think that writing essays is effortless are those who, equally misguidedly, think that writing essays is impossible. It is good to be ambitious and quite right to have high standards, but you will not be able to produce excellent essays straight away without any practice, and you will not always be able to live up to your highest standards. Do not aim always to produce an absolutely perfect essay – that would be unrealistic. It is more important that you produce essays (whether they are to be formally assessed or not), of the length required by the deadline you are given. You will then receive feedback on this work, with a view to developing your skills further. For some people, the result of having their standards set too high can be that they produce no work at all – because their perfectionism will not allow them to hand in work with any flaws. It is absolutely natural and normal to write essays with imperfections, omissions and faults – even the best writers do not write perfect essays.

Different sorts of written work

The written work you produce in the course of your degree will fall into one or more of these four categories:

• Essays that are not formally assessed
• Assessed essays
• Dissertations
• Exam essays.

(Oral presentations rely on some of the same reading, thinking and communication skills as written work, but there are differences; see Chapter 8.) If you take a degree course which includes producing written work that is not formally assessed (that is, the mark does not count towards your final degree result), this is an excellent opportunity to develop and test your writing skills in a relatively pressure-free context. Hopefully you will then have already developed your writing skills to a high level when you come to be appraised in your exams or other assessed written work. The ‘supervision’ and ‘tutorial’ systems at Cambridge and Oxford put particular emphasis on the production of regular essays for informal assessment throughout the year.

There are differences between non-assessed essays, assessed essays, dissertations, and exam essays; and each is discussed below. Assessed pieces will be longer and, sometimes, will include a little more background and discussion than the time-pressure of an exam may allow. They should also be more polished and include accurate references and a bibliography. But, as a rule, you should approach writing academic essays – whether for informal feedback, formal assessment, or for an exam – according to the same basic principles: you are being asked to write a well-informed, logical, persuasive, and clearly structured answer to a specific question. You should get into the habit of producing well-structured, well-written essays from the outset so that you know how to do so when it comes to the most important pieces of assessed written work and exams.

From school to university

If you are reading this book before arriving at university, it will be useful to think about how academic work at degree level will be different from what you have been used to at school. Even if you have already started a degree course it still might be useful to reflect on what your experiences have revealed about the different teaching and learning styles that prevail at school and at university, and on how to cope with those differences. One of the main differences between school and university is that at university a lot of the teaching comes in the form of lectures rather than classes or seminars, which are the predominant forms at school. You will need to work out how to make the most of lectures and how to take useful notes. This is discussed in Chapter 3. What are the other fundamental differences to be prepared for?

Taking the initiative

The most obvious and important difference is that as a university student you are expected to take a lot of the initiative for yourself. It is basically down to you to find out when your lectures and classes are, where they are taking place, who your tutor is, what library and internet resources are available to you, what networks of pastoral support are in place, and so on. It is down to you to find the books and articles that your lecturers and tutors ask you to read. It is down to you to produce written work on time; your lecturers will not be standing over you making sure you get down to work, nor reminding you when the deadline is. It is also down to you to seek out your lecturer or tutor if things are not going well and to explain the problems you are having.

School teachers and university lecturers

You will also soon learn that school teachers and university lecturers are very different creatures. It might be that you loved all your school teachers and found them to be caring, supportive and reasonable. It is possible, however, that some of your teachers seemed strict or over-demanding; perhaps they seemed not to understand you – not to be on your wavelength; perhaps they seemed harsh, even sadistic; perhaps you thought they had very poor social and communication skills. Well, if so, you ain’t seen nothing yet! You should be prepared to meet all of these faults on an entirely new scale when you come into contact with university lecturers. Hard though it may be to believe, on balance school teachers are a lot more accommodating, understanding, encouraging and socially skilled than university lecturers. You will find, most probably, that your lecturers are a lot more prepared than your school teachers were to dish out criticism and that they are a lot less practised at combining that criticism with encouragement, empathy and appreciation.

There is one particularly significant difference between school teachers and university lecturers, of which you should be aware from the outset. University lecturers, unlike school teachers, lead a sort of double life. They are responsible for designing and delivering undergraduate lecture courses, for setting exams and for marking assessed work. This is similar to the role of the school teacher – preparing and teaching lessons and setting and marking homework, assessed work and exams. University lecturers, however, as well as being employed to teach undergraduate and postgraduate students, are employed to pursue their own academic research. The question of how to balance teaching and research is pressing and constant for most university lecturers. As a result it is possible, although hopefully relatively rare, that you will feel that your lecturer’s teaching is not getting her full attention. This could be because she is preoccupied with writing a review, article or book which is due to be submitted. Academics are judged, by current and potential employers, primarily by the quantity and quality of the publications arising from their research. This is therefore bound to be one important focus of their working lives.

I offer this description of the life of the academic simply to explain the balance that your lecturers have to achieve between teaching and research, not to defend or condone lecturers who let their teaching suffer or who let their students feel like unwelcome distractions. The relationship between teaching and research should be managed in such a way that the two feed into each other. A lecturer’s own specialised research into, say, the circumstances and context of the composition of a particular philosophical tract in the seventeenth century should allow her to give her students fresh insights when giving an introductory seminar on that text, even if she cannot go into much detail in that context. And the questions and problems raised by students in such a seminar, and the obstacles she runs into when trying to explain the material to a student audience, should be instructive when it comes to writing up her research in a clear and persuasive way for an academic audience in due course. That is the ideal. It is important to understand how lecturers might succeed or fail in their attempt to attain this ideal if you are going to understand how and why lecturers and school teachers differ.

So far I have been focusing on the negative side of dealing with university lecturers, and you should certainly be prepared for the fact that you might have to deal with difficult and demanding teachers at university. However, it would be entirely unfair to give the impression that anything but a small proportion of academics are socially incompetent, other-worldly, bookish types concerned with their own minuscule area of research specialism to the exclusion of all else, including the needs of their students. This picture is a misleading caricature. The good news is that the majority of university lecturers take their teaching extremely seriously and provide stimulating lectures, classes and seminars, which provide opportunities for you to have access to someone with a very high level of knowledge, expertise and sophistication on a particular subject. Your lecturers – even those w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Further Reading