To answer this question I carried out an informal survey of 45 lecturers at a variety of Business schools in Britain.
The most common complaint was about inaccurate use of vocabulary: about 30% of respondents mentioned this. The next most serious concern (20%) was students not using critical thinking; e.g.subjecting sources to careful scrutiny. The third item was students' failure to answer the specific question in an essay, and instead answering a different question that hadn't been asked (17%).
This was followed by problems around plagiarism, and fifthly a lack of logical development in student essays (each 15%). Two other areas highlighted were need to use an argument style of writing (i.e. hypothesis-evidence-conclusion) - 11% - and a lack of clear essay organisation (introduction - main body - conclusion) (9%). Other points discussed were:
- Poor referencing
- Failure to give evidence of reading academic articles
- Use of paragraphs
- Over-short answers
- Over-complex sentences
- Mis-understanding of key terms e.g. explain, discuss
- Lack of proof reading
Although a different sample might give different results, I think these results are relevant to most student writing in higher education.
I wonder whether there is a bias for markers to complain about simple, easily-identifiable, difficulties in communication simply _because_ they are easy to spot.
ReplyDeleteIf you asked lecturers which areas _lost the most marks_, perhaps they would be likely to identify more difficult areas such as critical thinking far more.
Do lecturers mark down more due to difficulties in communicating caused by spelling, or difficulties in communicating critical thinking or answering the question directly, for example?
Perhaps 'what we complain about' is not the same as 'the most important things to develop' as students...
JS.