Doing Essays and Assignments

Essential Tips for Students

Pete Greasley

• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Year: 2016
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781473966321
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Essays in Education
• Index: Social Sciences

Have you ever been stunned by a low grade, when you were expecting an A or B?

Are you struggling to make the jump from a second to a first?

Doing Essays and Assignments gives you an insider's view on what tutors and professors really want when they assign essays and projects, and reveals how you can raise your game and achieve the best grades.

Drawing on a survey of lecturers, and examples of real student work, this handy guide provides practical advice to help you not only understand what is expected of you, but also get ideas on how to deliver what your tutor is looking for. Providing a behind-the-scenes look at marking, find out how you can successfully craft the perfect written assignment, and discover tips and techniques on:

• Planning and deadlines, helping you manage your workload effectively
• Gaining higher marks through critically formed arguments
• Communicating clearly with the correct language, grammar, and expression
• Avoiding common marking pitfalls such as referencing and plagiarism.

This new edition also reveals how to successfully navigate group work, literature reviews, and presentations to improve your grades.With valuable insight from tutors, and practical tips to apply to your work, you might just want to keep this book to yourself…!

SAGE Study Skills are essential study guides for students of all levels. From how to write great essays and succeeding at university, to writing your undergraduate dissertation and doing postgraduate research, SAGE Study Skills help you get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips, resources and videos on study success!

1 An insight into the marking process

In this chapter you’ll gain an insight into the marking process so you can see how things look from the tutor’s perspective. In particular, we’ll be looking at:

• The importance of bearing in mind that your tutor will have lots of assignments to mark and limited time to mark them
• The marking process at universities (which may involve up to three stages)
• Consistency across markers, and why some inconsistency might actually be a good thing
• Different types of markers (‘hawks’ and ‘doves’), and sources of bias that can influence the mark you’re awarded (including what you look like)
• How the transition from school/college to university may be a culture shock for some students

Marking assignments: four in an hour?

Let’s start by putting things into context. How many assignments does a typical tutor mark at the end of a typical term? Well, it varies of course, so I decided to take stock of my own marking at the end of a recent term. I compiled a list of:

• all the courses I taught (there were five courses with a total of seven written assignments)
• the number of words for each assignment (most were 2,000 words, but some were 8,000; the average worked out at around 3,000)
• the number of students on each course (200 students in total)

I then multiplied the number of words for each assignment by the number of students and finally summed up the total to reveal a staggering 510,000 (over half a million) words. Now, I’m not presenting these statistics for the sympathy vote; rather, the aim is to illustrate where your assignment stands in the grand scheme of things. The point is that, in the midst of this deluge of marking, assignments which are poorly presented and/or difficult to follow may receive relatively short shrift, especially when there is limited time in which to mark them.

This raises another question: How much time do you think a tutor spends marking an assignment? Well, although it may have taken you weeks to prepare and write your 2,000-word assignment (or not, as the case may be), the tutor will probably spend around 30 minutes reading and marking it. This includes writing up the comments. Obviously, this will vary depending on the tutor and the assignment. Some tutors will spend less time on each assignment, believing that ‘you should be able to mark four in an hour’. Really. According to one study by Norton (1990), the average time spent marking an assignment of 1,250 words was about 20 minutes; three of the six tutors in the study took less than 15 minutes. Four in an hour.

The marking journey: a ‘smooth ride’ or a ‘bone-shaker’?

So, we’ve established two things about the marking of assignments: (1) there are lots of them to mark; (2) there is limited time to mark them.

This being the case, what is a tutor looking for in an assignment? Well, perhaps the bare minimum might be termed a ‘smooth ride’. What does this mean? It means that I can read your 2,000-word assignment in roughly half an hour without having to stop every few sentences to make comments due to lack of clarity, problems with presentation, incorrect referencing, or generally because I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Think of it as going on a journey: the easier you make it for me to get from A to B the better; a poor assignment is like a journey in which you’ve made me stop every few minutes – due to traffic jams (unclear language or purpose), red lights (errors) or to check the route (poor structure and presentation). A good assignment gives me a clear run; a very good assignment includes interesting scenery on the way.

The learning journey: are you a hitch-hiker, an explorer, or just plain lost?

Interestingly, a similar analogy is proposed by Walter Skok (2003) and developed by Colin Neville (2009a), in which the grading of assignments is likened to a ‘journey of learning’ whereby the approach to study adopted by students will be reflected in their grade achieved for assignments. I’ve summarised the themes in Table 1.1.

The guidelines in this book are primarily designed to make my journey as a marker of assignments easier, but they should hopefully also make you, as a writer of assignments, a more interesting guide.

An insight into the marking process

The marking process will vary across different universities and departments, but in the UK it typically involves three stages:

• Step 1: First marking. Usually by your course/module tutor.
• Step 2: Internal moderation. ‘Moderation’ refers to the process for ensuring that marks awarded are fair, consistent and reliable. It’s more commonly known as second marking or double-marking by another tutor.
• Step 3: External moderation. Where a tutor from another university (an ‘external examiner’) comments on the marks awarded.

Let’s have at look at this process in more detail.

Step 1: First marking

So what happens to your assignment after you’ve handed it in? Well, once it’s been processed by admin:

1. Tutor comes into work to find four piles of assignments on his desk, each over a foot high
2. Tutor takes gun from holster and puts to head (or…)
3. Tutor takes essays home to mark the next day
4. On a nice summer’s day, tutor sets up sun-lounger in back garden and settles down to marking (with increasing quantities of ‘liquid refreshment’)
5. Tutor gets half-way through first assignment and scuttles back indoors due to: electric chainsaw, house alarms, barking dogs, gusty wind blowing pages everywhere …
6. Having read the assignment and made notes, the marking grid is consulted and the marks are entered accordingly, along with copious written feedback helping the student to address the identified areas of deficit. Repeat 100+ times.

The last point about feedback is important. In order to learn and improve you need good feedback: feedback for learning. So, if your assignment comes back with a mark of 44% and the only comment you get is ‘well done’ or ‘argument rather thin’, you might complain that this is not a great help. What you should be looking for (and asking for) is constructive feedback – comments that will help you to improve future assignments – not only what you haven’t done, but, most importantly, what you need to do in future to get a higher mark. In the final chapter we’ll be looking at the crucial role of feedback (and feed-forward) in more detail.

In recent years there has been a move towards online submission and marking of assignments. Where this is the case, the tutor will first check the assignment for plagiarism (copying without acknowledging the source, discussed in Chapter 11) to see what percentage of the text matches other sources – from books, websites, journal articles, and student essays (including your own previous submissions). This can be done automatically using a software program called Turnitin, which colour-codes the assignment according to the amount of text that matches other sources – see Figure 1.1. Once the colour turns to red it immediately starts flashing and an alarm alerts the plagiarism police; within minutes there will be a knock on the student’s door and they are never seen again.

Well, it’s not quite as simple as that, because Turnitin highlights everything that matches to other sources, including references and quotes that you have acknowledged with a citation. But, if Turnitin highlights large passages of text that are matched to other sources without citations, that’s when alarm bells ring (not literally). In a blatant case of plagiarism, the assignment will be subject to investigation. And when all the other students in your class are congratulating or commiserating with each other about their mark, you’ll be opening a mysterious letter inviting you to see the tutor for a discussion about your assignment … (the ‘P’ word may not be mentioned, initially); you may also be summoned to an academic standards committee.

Figure 1.1 Online plagiarism reports

Not that I want to worry you. I recall once having a group of students in my office who were petrified that every little match (words and phrases) between their assignments and others could lead to a charge of plagiarism. Avoiding plagiarism is about writing in your own words and ensuring sources are cited accurately. There’s a lot more on this in Chapter 11.

So, assuming that the tutor has checked the assignment for plagiarism, and found it to be acceptable, he will then mark it. The key advantage of marking online is that it saves on paper and admin, and the tutor can create a ‘bank’ of frequently used comments that can be quickly inserted into the assignment, e.g. ‘good argument’, ‘citation needed’, ‘unclear expression’, ‘check spelling’, ‘wrong’, ‘very wrong’, ‘where do I start?’, ‘ridiculous’, ‘bizarre’, ‘I’m losing the will to live here’, ‘help me’.

From a student’s point of view, online submission saves on printing and enables feedback to be provided earlier because there is less administration involved. There can, however, be problems uploading assignments leading to anxious emails and phone calls. If you have a problem submitting your assignment online, my advice is to email it by the deadline, but be aware that this may mean extra work for the tutor if they have to upload the assignment for you (and probably not just you). This is for emergencies only – check with your tutor for their preferences in case of problems like this.

Step 2: Second marking (in moderation)

The process for second marking will vary across departments and universities, but once the first marker (usually your course tutor) has marked the assignments a selection may be passed on to another tutor for ‘second marking’ (especially when the marks contribute to your final degree classification). Typically, this will be a sample (10–20%) of the assignments representing the range of grades – top, middle, bottom, including ‘borderlines’ (e.g. 49%, 59%) and all ‘fails’.

Second marking may be done independently or ‘blindly’, that is, where the second marker does not know the grade awarded by the first marker (so they come to an independent decision about the mark), but often ‘second marking’ is more like a ‘second opinion’: the second marker does see the grade and the comments from the first marker. Their role, then, is to check the reliability of the marks (are they fair, consistent, too generous or too harsh?) and comment on the feedback provided (does it reflect the mark and promote learning?). Where there is significant disagreemen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration List
• Table List
• About the Author
• Preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgements
• Why you should read this book (and keep it to yourself)
• 1 An insight into the marking process
• 2 How to impress and how to distress markers
• 3 Before you start, some rules of the game
• 4 Getting started … and getting finished
• 5 Reading and researching the literature
• 6 Introductions, conclusions and structure
• 7 What was the question again?
• 8 Critical analysis, perspective and argument
• 9 The greatest source of ‘marker distress’: language, grammar and expression
• 10 Referencing – an academic fetish for the anally retentive?
• 11 Plagiarism
• 12 How not to present graphs and charts
• 13 Presenting your assignment: first impressions count
• 14 Feedback and feed-forward
• 15 Writing research/project reports
• 16 Doing a systematic literature review
• 17 Presentations: a fate worse than death?
• 18 Group project work, or ‘hell is other people’
• References
• Index