Marking and Commenting on Essays - University of Edinburgh

1 Marking and Commenting on EssaysChapter 6 Tutoring and Demonstrating: A Handbook51 Chapter 6 Marking and Commenting on EssaysDai HounsellINTRODUCTIONAs a tutor, you may well be asked to mark andcomment on at least some of the Essays and otherwritten work which your students submit as partof their coursework assessment. This chapter istherefore concerned with what is involved inmarking Essays accurately and reliably, and inproviding students with constructive feedback inthe form of written or oral base, assessment entails making an informed andconsidered judgement about the quality of astudent's performance on a given assignments require students to 'puttheir learning on display',1 so that tutors canevaluate: how well the subject-matter has been grasped; how effectively students have practised thecritical and analytical techniques which thatdiscipline calls for whether it be EnglishLiterature, Physics, Economics or Anthropology.

2 Students' degree of mastery of the skillsinvolved in communicating ideas and evidenceclearly and to say, evaluating Essays and othercoursework assignments is a crucial as well as ademanding task. Tutors have a responsibility totheir University and to their chosen discipline toensure that appropriate standards are pursued andupheld. Equally, they have a responsibility to theirstudents, whose academic progression depends onthe grades they receive, to mark their work fairly,consistently and assessment, it needs to be emphasised, has notone main purpose but two: coursework enablesuniversity teachers to judge what standardsstudents have attained, but it also provides studentswith the feedback they need to learn the earliest research efforts by psychologists,nearly a century ago, established the importance ofwhat was then called the Law of Effect.

3 It is hard tomake headway in any kind of learning task if youdo not have a firm impression of how well you Feedback on coursework meets this needby alerting students to their strengths and to theirweaknesses, and by suggesting how the quality oftheir work might be improved. Feedback thereforehelps students to focus their intellectual energiesin the most productive way, and thus to achieve thebest of which they are capable. And in so doing, itmakes it possible for universities to set and tosustain high academic chapter explores how you might best pursuethese twin purposes of coursework assessment what we might call assessment-for-grading andassessment-for-learning. It looks at what you willneed to do to prepare the ground, for yourself andyour students, prior to a coursework essay; at whatmarking and Commenting on students' work willinvolve; and at what is likely to be required toensure that your marks and comments are takennote of and followed up.

4 First, however, it looks atwhat is known about how students go about theircoursework and what they derive from it. Themajority of the findings discussed originate instudies of undergraduate essay-writing, althoughmany of these findings are applicable to other kindsof coursework a tutor, you are obviously someone who hasdone very well academically - so well, perhaps, thatit is easy to lose sight of what a typicalundergraduate student can realistically might therefore find it helpful at this point totry and think back to your early (and perhapsfaltering and uncertain?) experiences of whatwriting an essay was like in your first year atuniversity. And if you still have your first-yearessays on file, why not take a look at them againwith a fresh eye, to jog your memory?

5 Chapter 6 Marking and Commenting on EssaysTutoring and Demonstrating: A Handbook52 COURSEWORK AND STUDENT LEARNING"I sit at my window" says a character in Jean Rhys'Wide Sargasso Sea, "and the words fly past me likebirds with God s help I catch some".3 Writingseldom comes easily to most people. It is a struggleto commit one's thoughts, ideas and feelings topaper in a way which seems to do them most students, too, writing takes veryconsiderable effort. It also occupies a large swatheof their independent study time. In someuniversities, arts and social sciences students arerequired to write the equivalent of one essay everyten days; and even where the volume of courseworkis not as high as this, writing assignments isnonetheless time-consuming.

6 Some students, itseems, manage to get their Essays written in underten hours; others may take as long as thirty,extending over several days or even pertinently, students and tutors alike areinclined to underestimate just how much time isrequired to complete a coursework well-designed Australian survey looked at alarge variety of assignments across a wide range ofsubject areas, and compared tutors' and students'forecasts of how long it would take to write eachassignment with the time students actually average, the students spent nearly twice as muchtime as they had anticipated and almost three timesas much as their tutors had what preparing and drafting an assignmentinvolves, however, the amount of time and effortrequired is hardly surprising.

7 First, coursework istypically stipulative: it is the teacher rather thanthe student who decides what the topic is to be, howit is to be tackled, what counts as 'essential' orrecommended reading, and how long the finishedassignment should be. Students therefore have towork closely to this brief, rather than being free tofollow their own instincts or preferences. Second,assignment-writing involves an intricate series ofsteps, as shown in figure 1. It is worthwhile takinga closer look at these six steps. We can explore thedemands which each step makes of students andbegin to reflect on what implications this might havefor the guidance students will find most helpful (aquestion to which we return later in the chapter).Choosing a Question or TopicA student's usual first step is to choose the essaytopic or question to be tackled.

8 Having severaldifferent titles to choose from is not necessarilyliberating, as the following comment suggests:It's horrible when there's about eight choices, 'cos I'm like arabbit, a rat with several traps I don t know which one tostick my head students, of course, put off deciding whichtitle they will tackle until they have done enoughof the required reading to be able to make a moreinformed choice. And as class sizes rise at a timewhen library budgets too are under pressure, it isimportant to bear in mind that students' scope tochoose between assignment topics may be moreapparent than real. Which topic is eventuallychosen may be influenced as much by theavailability of library copies of recommendedreading as by what most engages a student' the Question or TopicAssignment titles and topics are usually craftedwith great care.

9 Most University teachers take painsto devise titles which will subtly stretch students'intellects whilst at the same time focusing theirenergies within realistic and manageable 1 STEPS IN WRITING AN ESSAYC hoosing a topic or questionAnalysing the topic or question chosenReading and noting relevant materialDrawing up an essay planWriting the essayReviewing and redraftingMarking and Commenting on EssaysChapter 6 Tutoring and Demonstrating: A Handbook53 Some students are alert to these subtleties ofphrasing and direct their thinking , however, lack this awareness: withoutguidance in dissecting assignment questions, theywill be prone to take a question as a broad invitationto write on a theme rather than as a call to addressa tightly specified , almost any assignment question atundergraduate level will be tacit to greater or lesserdegrees: what is required often goes beyond thesurface meaning of the words appearing in Students may be invited, for example, to'discuss', 'consider', 'review' or 'examine' a particularissue, but dictionary definitions of commonplaceterms such as these will be of limited value:I felt pretty satisfied with my essay.

10 I thought I'd get abrilliant mark for it. So I was really put off when I saw thelecturer's comments. I just thought it was what the essaysaid: "What limits a person s ability to do two things atonce?" Not why, or how it was done. What I did I thoughtwas very relevant, but the lecturer wanted 'how' and 'why'factors, and I didn't quite answer base, then, all assignment questions can bethought of as similar regardless of how they areworded. All carry with them the implicitexpectation that the conventions of writtenacademic discourse in the discipline concerned weighing, analysing, assessing critically, evaluatingsystematically, as a historian or geologist or linguistwould do will be , therefore, a student's essay seems to lack'relevance', or simply fails to 'answer the question',the problem may well lie beyond inattention to theparticular assignment question or topic set.