Tips for Students

At Swinburne Online we mostly use holistic rubrics in in the education units. Rubrics, in general, are a wonderful assessment strategy as they clearly outline the criteria and expectations. There is no guess work about what the assessment wants the student to achieve. It allows for student self-reflection, which is a very important skills in all fields, but particularly in teaching. 

Holistic rubrics, I believe, work in favour of the student because they allow the marker to consider the assessment as a whole, rather than breaking it down into a concrete set of figures. Some students have expressed concern that it allows for a bias on the part of the marker and perhaps there is some discretion handed to us. What students need to understand is that as tertiary teachers we want you to succeed. The bias is in your favour.

I often have feedback from student, post-assessment, that they are concerned that they ‘lost marks’ over certain points or even trivial matters. This is not how the holistic marking process works. We don’t seek-out flaws and take off points for your errors. We look at the paper as a whole; What have you done well; and what needs improving? When I provide feedback on areas of weakness, they are not to indicate that for that particular sentence you lost marks. The comments are there to help you develop in your understanding of the content and your academic writing abilities.

Before we start marking any papers the teachers go through moderation. We consider sample papers and we undergo a sometimes lengthy process of ensuring that we are all interpreting the rubric and the assessment requirements fairly. We ensure that we are all on the same page. This is why it is important that students engage with their teachers and clarify their own understanding of the assessment, so that you can effectively be part of the moderation process. We take your questions and concerns back to our colleagues and consider your comments when we undergo the moderation process. Particularly at postgraduate level, it really isn’t good enough to say ‘but I thought….’ after the assessment marks are released. You are given the assessment outlines well in advance, so there is plenty of time to ensure that you understand what you are supposed to be doing.

When marking, any papers that we believe do not achieve a pass or that we are unsure about in our interpretation we get them cross-marked by one of the team. This is part of our ongoing quality assurance, which I believe it very important.

What is black and white is your referencing. I have plenty of resources on this blog and on www.facebook.com/tipsformystudents to help you with that.

I am about to get into marking another round of assessments and in preparing for marking, I thought it would be helpful to let you know what markers might be thinking when they open up your paper. First impressions do matter. When the document opens up, there are things that are immediately obvious to a marker. We can draw initial conclusion about the quality of the research, planning and structure with a mere glance. Here is what I look for:

Do you know who I am? I am no ego-maniac, but if you have a title page and you have not written my name on the front correctly, it indicates to me that you may not be engaging with the learning process very effectively. Unlike face-to-face teaching, whenever you logon to read anything on our online forum you see my name at every turn. So really, you should know my name is not Victoria. But that is not a major crime, so I giggle and move on.

In-text citations… How many? Where are they? At a quick glance I can make a judgment on a few things just by scanning how many in-text citations you have in your essay and where they are. No in-text citations or too few, shows me that either you do not understand the importance of referencing, you may have plagiarised or that you have not researched for your essay effectively. Before I start reading I am already wondering about the quality of your academic writing and wondering how you are going to construct strong arguments without supporting references (by the way… you can’t). Often I see a citation plonked at the end of a paragraph, almost to indicate that whole paragraph is based on that one reference. That is not how it works. Each claim and each point that you are attempting to illustrate must be supported by a reference.

Range of citations? Not only am I looking for the quantity of your references but I am looking at your range. With a quick scan I can see if an entire paragraph (or even a whole essay) is based primarily on just one or two references. This tells me that you are not reading widely and that you are not conducting effective research to develop your understanding of the content. You should be reading a range of different articles to help you draw your own conclusions. Your work should not just be a reconfiguring of a couple of sources.

Paragraph structure Without even reading your essay I can make a judgment about your planning process. If you have very long chunks of writing that take up whole pages then I know that your planning process needs to be improved. A paragraph should contain one key point. It needs a topic sentence, supporting evidence and development of your key idea. The formula is quite simple, but students get caught up writing very lengthy paragraphs because they are trying to get too many ideas into the one space. If you have a series of very short paragraphs, then this indicates that you have thrown out a lot of idea out without developing them adequately. I suggest you really take time to plan. Even if you are rushing and writing an essay last-minute, take the time to mind-map and visually organise your thoughts. Road-map your essay so that it is clear, logical and simple to follow. Academic writing is not meant to be difficult to follow… quite the opposite. It should be succinct, focused and highly structured.