Why Coursework Isn`t All Bad

Coursework receives a favourable reaction from many students, yet for others, it brings doom and gloom. The premise is fairly straightforward instead of sitting a high-pressure, timed exam, students can go into more depth in their studies and apply themselves across a longer period of time in order to produce something perhaps more meaningful. The downside to this approach to summative assessment, however, is that the stresses of study can be prolonged, especially for students who find it more difficult to organise their time and resources.

For those students embarking on a new academic year, and particularly those in GCSE/AS/A-Level years, who have never encountered the particular demands of coursework before, this will hopefully offer some pointers on how to approach the challenge.

Start with an open mind:

Have you been set a defined question, or is there licence to create your own question and answer it? If you have a set question, you must approach with the mind-set that you sit on the fence until all reading and preparatory work is completed. Only then can you be balanced in your critical approach to answering the question.

If you can create your own question, a similar principle applies. You obviously have space to follow lines of enquiry which interest you, but if you find yourself fighting to find evidence to answer your question, there is much to be said for retreating a few steps and pursuing different avenues of enquiry as well.

Question the question, and set parameters:

What does the question you are answering actually demand, and how are you going to define the limits of your enquiries? For example, the question “to what extent was the First World War responsible for changes to the lives of women between 1880 and 1980” encompasses a scope far too broad to answer it all in complete detail. In this instance, establishing several themes, such as suffrage, rights in society, access to the workplace, etc, and examining how they change across the period should be the starting point. Once those changes have been established and defined, you can then move onto analysing the reasons behind those changes.

Be critical and seek alternative explanations:

Throughout your research and planning, you will inevitably, and frequently, change your mind about how you will answer your coursework. If there appears to be a weight of evidence building up to oppose the prevailing views, or the view which you hoped to argue, then you must consider how weighty that evidence is, and adjust your arguments accordingly. Using the above example again, for every theme you have identified as a set of changes, you should seek to link the evidence that events were the reason behind those changes, and not simply coincidental.

Planning before writing is crucial:

You should be able to structure your full coursework in bullet points, knowing what your themes and arguments are, before you write up in full. Not only will this aid you in structuring your work coherently, but it will allow you to identify where the gaps and inconsistencies in your arguments may exist. The central themes of the work should be summarised and structured first, and then the conclusion. Once you are satisfied with the order and flow of arguments in bullet point form, you can summarise your conclusion. The introduction should be written last, because by this point you have arranged your arguments and evidence in a coherent manner, instead of writing the order first and then attempting to fit the pieces in around what could be a flawed structure.

Style and flow are important:

Mark schemes today are very rigid, and should be adhered to as much as humanly possible. However, that doesn’t mean that individual style should be sacrificed, and indeed, individual style can enhance the reading of such coursework. The most important points to make here concern the flow of the work. A pithy line should end each paragraph (in an essay-style coursework), briefly re-emphasising the importance of the argument you have just made, but also setting up the next paragraph and argument, to ensure the piece flows smoothly. This is an important tool, because it highlights to the examiner when the argument may be about to change direction because the evidence does not support the argument any further, or if you are continuing in the same vein but through a different theme. It also highlights to you whether you can successfully argue what you would like to argue if you cannot write that connecting line, then perhaps the order of your arguments needs changing, or you need to re-evaluate why you are making that argument in the first place.

Following these steps is not fool-proof:

Finally, a small disclaimer. There is no set way to answer a coursework question, and marking is still somewhat at the whim of whoever it is that marks the work. However, clarity, being succinct, and writing with a coherent structure will immediately give a good impression and elevate your work to the higher marks banding for your coursework, regardless of the content. Coursework is a marathon, not a sprint, and careful preparation is required to achieve the truly top marks.

Hopefully this advice, even taken in small pieces, can help to improve how you approach coursework, and help to make sense of the often bewildering amount of information you are required to process before answering the question. The process can be very stressful alongside the demands from other subjects, but systematic preparation and organisation can mitigate a lot of that stress, and help to produce a much higher quality final piece of work.