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- 1. How to Get a First Dr P V Smith Paul.v.smith@manchester.ac.uk 5th November 2015 Simon Lecture Theatre E
- 2. Paul What will happen when they don’t get a first – I see a whole swathe of Appeals!!! Best Wishes
- 3. • Tefula, M. (2012) How to get a first (Palgrave) • Mueller, J. (2013) How to get a first (Kindle) • Dixon, T. (2004) How to get a first (Routledge)
- 4. “Innovation” • “Excellently executed work that innovates in an intelligent way will certainly get a first”. • “Innovation involves making original, unexpected, and interesting points”.
- 5. How to get students up to a 2:1 • Get rid of grammatical mistakes • Write more clearly • Reference properly and consistently • Use paragraphing appropriately • Encourage more reading, and / or better quality reading • Subordinate reading to an argument • Ensure a persuasive case is argued throughout • Improve use of information resources • Apply structure across the board • Increase analysis and decrease description • Increase relevance to the concerns of the course • Cut out spelling mistakes • Demonstrate understanding to a greater extent
- 6. An innovative essay… • Might take a counter-intuitive or unusual line of argument and make it work • Might use an analogy with an entirely different idea, topic, or academic problem • Might make connections with knowledge and ideas from a different subject / authors • Might cast doubt on the very assumptions the question is based on • Might argue against the accepted orthodoxy of the subject • Might use obscure or left-field sources • Might apply interesting data or methodology
- 7. Academic Literacies, AKA “The Theory Bit” • “A practices approach to literacy takes account of the cultural and contextual component of writing and reading practices” (Lea & Street 1998:158, emphasis added); in comparison to • “Educational research into student learning in higher education [which] has tended to concentrate on ways in which students can be helped to adapt their practices to those of the university: from this perspective, the codes and conventions of academia can be taken as given”.
- 8. “As students switch between such disciplines, course units, modules and tutors, different assumptions about the nature of writing, related to different epistemological presuppositions about the nature of academic knowledge and learning, are being brought to bear, often implicitly, on the specific writing requirements of their assignments” (ibid.:161).
- 9. “We suggest that, in practice, what makes a piece of student writing ‘appropriate’ has more to do with issues of epistemology than with the surface features of form to which staff often have recourse when describing their students’ writing. That is to say, underlying, often disciplinary, assumptions about the nature of knowledge affected the meaning given to the terms ‘structure’ and ‘argument’. Since these assumptions varied with context, it is not valid to suggest that such concepts are generic and transferable, or represent ‘common sense ways of knowing’” (ibid.).
- 10. Student interpretations • “Students described taking ‘ways of knowing’ and [ways] of writing from one course into another only to find that their attempt to do this was unsuccessful and met with negative feedback” (ibid.:163). • “I did the same things in this essay as the last one but got a much lower mark”. • In HE research, student respondents often talk of “cracking the code” or “working out the rules” of writing.
- 12. Anecdotes from experience • The second year essay – Aiming for a 1st entails risk – Think bigger – go beyond the confines • The symbolism essay – Ethnographic, not just conceptual explication – Application of conceptual components (= analysis) • The microfiche essay – Baudrillard and the “hyper-real” – With added diagrammatical representation
- 13. From research • Second year Sociology course • “As far as gender and sexuality are concerned, nature has ‘nothing to do with it’” (Weeks, 1985). Discuss this statement with reference to gender and/or sexuality. • Two students in my study wrote on this title...
- 14. S: What I wrote, I didn’t read, I didn’t go in with an idea that I’d read. I went with an idea that I thought about. I’m sure someone’s done it before and whatever, but it was my idea…what did I write? It was just a bit of a different…it wasn’t like a for-and-against, it was a bit more, a bit more of a kind of different take on the title. P: Can you say more about that? S: The title was “As far as gender and sexuality are concerned, nature has nothing to do with it. Discuss this in reference” [sic]. And I didn’t argue that nature has something to do with it or nothing to do with it per se, I argued that nature has something to do with it because nature is an entirely socially constructed idea… So therefore it has everything to do with it, but not in the way that you would assume nature to be. That’s the line of argument I took.
- 15. Tutor 1: ...students really feel that if they see a picture of a man or woman, they can describe what is masculine, what is feminine about them just by looking at the picture, but they don’t realise that [this course] is actually pretty theoretical. For them it’s just fun, you know, talking about sex, lesbians, homosexuals... they don’t really connect with the theoretical challenge, which is more important on a sociology course. Tutor 2: Its aim is to change people’s thinking. A lot of students arrive with the attitude that there’s something natural to gender and that ultimately they are natural qualities, something inherent. It’s a very sociological or cultural studies project in that it seeks to encourage students to investigate the idea that these things we take as natural are in fact constructed, the results of human interaction.
- 16. Why did it work? • Apart from being excellent executed... • Personal: “an idea that I had thought about” • Irrefutable in terms of constructivist theory – if everything is a construction, why not nature? • So: a twist on the title in perfect consonance with the theory • This response was within the “possibilities” of the course • A wide range of reading available to back up this argument • Demonstrates theoretical understanding that casts doubt on previously unproblematic terms (sociologists love this)
- 17. • Third year Economics course • Could perhaps more accurately be described as “political philosophy” • With some very specific approaches demanded • Again, taken by two students on the study
- 18. S: He was quite instructive, but then he just left us quite a lot of room for analysing. P: ...can you remember any of what he said? S: Well, the course is based on primary readings, really. […] He wanted us to focus on what all these philosophers said themselves rather than getting secondary stuff of people from today who wrote on them. He said read that for guidance, and he said, well, in the end, discuss the theories but I don’t want you to question them, he said it more or less like that... So he wanted us to adduce primary sources; and in the end he said, I don’t want you to have a bibliography of fifteen references, or whatever. He said do the primary research, show me that you’ve done the primary research, and then add a couple of secondary readings which you may read and include, but it’s really based on primary readings.
- 19. S: I think the way he wants you to do it is base it on your own interpretation quite a lot, which means you have to read it, read the primary texts very carefully and sort of think about them a lot. Which is pretty hard compared to reading secondary sources. P: Right. Did he say anything at the beginning of the course or in terms of essay guidance to you? S: Yeah, he sort of did it throughout. He made it clear, that sort of independent thought. Because the lectures are quite sort of open-ended, he doesn’t say “they said this”, he leaves quite a lot of space for you to try to make the most of... I think normally for an essay, [you’re] engaging with the ideas of the author, and so the secondary readings are almost more important than the primary, but for this one it was the other way around.
- 20. You can start off and say, well Locke says this, then he says that, and that’s his argument, and so on. OK, so that’s what you can do. And then you can say, so why is Locke doing this? So then you can say, he was doing this – this is like the second level of [analysis] – because he was generally interested in the question of legitimate government, and he was interested in that because he was looking in the last half of the seventeenth century in England, when there was this revolution and blah-di-blah-di-blah and he was interested in providing a justification for revolution... and some students just won’t get that. They’ll get it at one level of simplicity, “well he says this”, which you’ll get from one level of reading...
- 21. But then the others will say more, and they’ll talk about things you’d only get from knowing more about the book, the context and the purposes for which it was written and so on, and that really gives you the meaning, you see, you can’t really get the meaning from the superficial. You can only get the meaning from saying, why did he say that, what was he attacking by saying that?
- 22. Conclusion • Perspiration vs. Inspiration... • Originality, not just execution, is the way to consistent first class marks • You can’t buy ideas or inspiration, but you can learn to put yourself in position where they might occur • When they do, back yourself to take (judicious) risks • Be prepared to reflect; work things out
Editor's Notes
- So – this is session not a guarantee or a contract, but instead a series of hints and anecdotes that will hopefully give some pause / cause for thought, and be helpful. (In fact, that’s what one review of Dixon says – “This is not some kind of get rich quick scheme, but a collection of good advice”.) Any such guidance tries to make evident those kinds of things that are not normally made open to students – this is what the eponymous books all trade on. I’ll be using: Some insights from one of the books. Some insights from my own undergraduate studies (a while back now). Some insights from working with theoretical debates, and with real actual students, on my PhD. And everything here concerns essay writing – no other written genre or assessment type. As the students I’ve spoken to this semester know, essay writing is still the most popular form of written assessment at universities, and the most important for the kinds of people who will be here today.
- You can still buy any of these through Amazon. I have the Dixon book and still use it – it’s aged a little, but is still worth the read. (Will be using it for many points of departure today.) I’ve not read the others, so we can dispense with them. I would still recommend reading the Dixon, for sure, although you need to be aware that matters concerning finding sources to read have moved on apace since 2004 and you will need to be proficient with finding and using electronic sources, not just books.
- The quotes: Dixon (2004:167, 166). BASS students might remember me using this quote in the first of my sessions on essay writing earlier in the semester. (This is where it gets fully developed.) Note here that there are the two threads to this advice. You might be able to gain a first class mark from “excellent execution” alone, but “innovating in an intelligent way” is where the money is. This is, in a sense, what I will be focusing on. Note that it is much harder to tell or show somehow how to “innovate”, or find the scope for innovation within a particular essay writing task. In the background, you must remember to execute as well as innovate to get the top marks.
- Getting students up to a 2:1 level from 2:2 or lower is really rather easy. You can improve their work along any or all of the lines listed here, as appropriate (and see also Dixon, p. 165-6). The trouble is that these criteria are often necessary but not sufficient for obtaining a first class mark. In other words, you can do all of these things well (or even perfectly) but your marker will still be justified in not awarding you anything higher than a 2:1 mark. The real challenge is getting them from consistent 2:1 level to first class level. That is much harder. This slide is about the “excellently executed” in Dixon.
- And so on and so forth. Again, doing this is no guarantee of success, and depends on (as Dixon says), how intelligent and insightful the innovation is, and how well executed the whole essay is. We should probably add that the innovation should also be in proportion to the scope of the essay, and that it is possible to attempt too much innovation (hence, “in an intelligent way”) – e.g., you could attempt to read too much, carry out uninformed theory building, use personal experience in an unsophisticated way, and so on.
- Here’s the theory bit. Look, you can’t have a lecture without a bit of theory. So: at this point, we can note that the previous slide provided a number of approaches that if done well might be worthy of a first class mark. But many of these rely on the student being able to deploy competences that are not traditionally talked about or noted in university teaching, and even in educational research. The reason I am introducing this bit of theoretical background is because not only, like any half-decent theory, does it help to shed some light on empirical (real-world) occurrences, but it also hints at some practical modes of action (adaptive behaviour) that should be useful to students hoping to maximise their marks.
- This is why academic literacies is given as a plural – we do not end up talking about a single literacy that characterises all academic writing – that would be to adhere to what is called the academic socialisation model (as we shall come on to see). The idea of plural literacies is related to the idea of plural identities, of knowledges and so on – the idea that there are aspects and contexts to these things that make it hard to talk of each of them as singular. (For the social scientists among the audience, this is a very post-structuralist idea.) To “the nature of academic knowledge”, we could also add academic argument, evidence, warranting, demonstration, proof, and so on. It amounts to the same kind of thing, though. Note also the use of ‘implicitly’ – students are expected to pick these things up.
- Academic heritage here: tacit knowing (Polanyi). In Lea & Street’s study, academic staff used terms such as ‘structure’, ‘argument’, and ‘critical’, but were not able to explicate more fully on their meaning. Likewise, Lea & Street were told things like “I know a good essay when I see it but I cannot describe how to write it”. So to be fair to the academic staff, this is not necessarily about withholding information from students (although a teacher always wants their student to be able to work things out), but is also about things that are inexpressible, or at least inexpressible out of context, or very difficult to articulate. Note here the example that Lea & Street provide, of the History student whose essay for an Anthropology course received poor feedback. Despite applying the standards and forms of structure, argument, and so on that he was used to using in writing History essays, the Anthropology feedback was this (p. 166): “'You really have a problem with this essay, mainly for the reason that it is so incoherent. It has no beginning, middle and end, no structure, no argument'. The student is advised to go the university study centre 'and make enquires about essay-writing clinics'.”
- NB:- this is partly from Lea & Street and partly from my own data, which coheres with their findings. The second bullet is a paraphrase of the kind of thing that some of my student participants said. Intellectual heritage here: Winch / Wittgenstein – what does it mean to identify an action or a practice as “the same”? People like me find things like this interesting: what does it mean, when writing essays on different subjects, for different people, and perhaps in different disciplines, to be able to say that you are “doing the same things” in terms of what Lea & Street call “literacy practices”? Further to this, according to Peter Winch, following Wittgenstein, “It is only in terms of a given rule that we can attach a specific sense to the words ‘the same’” (1958: 27). So when you are talking about rules, or thinking that the same things may apply across cases, you may well be speaking or thinking in terms of generalisations that, if we accept Lea & Street’s arguments, may not pertain.
- Note that when students start talking about “I did the same thing” or “I wrote it in the same way, but got a different result”, etc., then one way of describing what we hope would be a burgeoning awareness is to say that they are recognising the limits of an academic socialisation model (i.e. that there are uniform ‘academic standards’ at play), and are instead realising that the goalposts move somewhat for every instantiation of essay writing. They will start to realise the relevance of the factors that Lea & Street write about: epistemology, discipline, and local expectations especially, but also identity, power, authority, and the contestation of knowledge. Study skills: assumes that literacy is a set of discrete skills that students will learn and then transfer to all academic writing contexts as appropriate. This model emphasises surface features such as grammar and spelling. Academic socialisation: as a reaction to the study skills model, the assumption of the academic socialisation model is that it is the task of the university tutor to induct students into a single, homogeneous academic culture. The focus is on the orientation to learning in the academy (e.g. “independent learning”) and the interpretation of the learning task. Academic literacies: this approach sees academic writing as a social practice, as mentioned, where the issues are those of identity and epistemology. To quote Lea & Street again (ibid.:159), “From the student point of view a dominant feature of academic literacy practices is the requirement to switch practices between one setting and another, to deploy a repertoire of linguistic practices appropriate to each setting, and to handle the social meanings and identities that each evokes”. Lea & Street emphasise that these models, although seen in a hierarchy, are not mutually exclusive – we don’t reject the earlier models when we take up the new one, but incorporate it in a more nuanced way. What’s the lesson? Remember that a particular essay writing context, task, or setting is not amenable to a generalised set of rules. Different practices can be and are described using the same terminology. The more you can be sensitive and flexible to the demands of all three of these levels, the greater your chances of success.
- Thankfully, I can speak from experience. Quick background here – BA in Sociology. And anecdotes are always entertaining and memorable. It entails risk, but the risk can be quite liberating. It answers the question: can you handle breadth, as well as depth? Are you learning not just from each class, but from your degree? It entails risk, but also a bit of luck. For instance, the symbolism essay. I was worried about not having enough words to fill the word limit, which is not a good place to be in. Microfiche – see The Spy Who Loved Me.
- Explain the profile of the two students and the problems that the less successful one had with this. However, we are going to focus on the more successful of the two.
- S = student, P = Paul. You can already get the idea from this that here is a smart thinker…
- This from speaking with the tutors, of course. Part of the trouble is, of course (and this is just a fact of life), that the lecturers don’t necessarily say these things to the students – as we have seen, sometimes they are just implicit, sometimes they are purposely not mentioned. It helps to be a researcher, that’s how you get these things out of them. So it’s fairly easy to get an idea of what the tutors broadly want to see students doing. These are messages that should be clear from the instruction and from the material covered. Our successful student appears to have realised these things and managed to write accordingly, in this course specifically – these messages might apply to other courses, but most likely not.
- In fact, more reading was available than she used, so I think she could have obtained an even higher mark! “Once you start thinking about it, these problems emerge...”. I hope that some of the things we have said about identity, authority, epistemology, and very local writing practices start to become clear from this. Hark back to Lea & Street.
- It is recognised as being different to nearly all other economics courses, and is heavily essay-based. This is important, because many students come to the course unfamiliar with writing essays at all, let alone those with the very particular focus and emphases that are required in this course.
- This is “Student 1”, who didn’t grasp things quite as quickly as “Student 2”. A good follow up quote from this student: “Yeah, in a way, [it’s] different from the other courses. It’s somehow quite opposite, with the readings and everything. Often you can’t, I think, have a really original opinion. Even if you’re writing your own stuff, you’re just reproducing the opinion of someone else, or the opinions of readings, whereas if you do it with primary readings, it’s more interesting because you’re actually thinking about it, because you’re thinking about your own opinion put onto paper.”
- And Student 2. Note that both of them have listened to the lecturer carefully and are able to characterise this course in terms of its specific features, not least by contrasting the essays with the essays from (all) other courses. It is interesting to see that say, completely independently, almost exactly the same things! But the challenge comes in the “space” they talk about, which is left for them to fill (to continue the metaphor) with their personal readings.
- The lecturer. He talks about how he marks, and why Student 2 received such a good mark.
- Note that there is a limit to how much the lecturer can and will make this overt. Speaking to him, you get the feeling that over-conceptualising might just cause the students more problems in terms of comprehension. This is made clear from the structure of the course, and that is the overt and conscious decision of the lecturer. He relies on students to pick this up. This point is extremely important! As I have told my BASS students from the beginning of the semester, these clues do tend to be available in various places in the course. It could be in the lectures in their order or content, or the bigger picture could be included in the course unit outline. Think about ways of linking the characteristics of the course with ways in which you will complete your essay. What are the questions that the academics are asking? What happens when you ask similar questions? Why are those questions worth asking?
- Conclusion...if you’ve listened this far you’ll know that it’s hard to distil all that into a few bullet points. In that sense, there can be no conclusion. There’s no formula to this, no calculus. Things don’t become clearer with more and more general explanation; rather, they tend to become clearer through outlining a series of perspicuous cases. There are different reasons for lecturers not making all the requirements clear – not least that they can’t be – but also because there must be a distance that the learner has to traverse in order to learn. How you traverse that distance determines how successful you will be.