Acing Assessments

Audrey – Bachelor of Science (Pathology)

I think the most enjoyable assignments for me as a science student in uni, would be the LAB ones. I do love doing the lab assignments the most because sometimes you’re going to be working in a group, and I find that I’m a very collaborative learner so I do learn a lot more when I’m working in a group of other people. But It’s also just fun. The classes I do, they’re very fun, especially the experiments and I really love doing them. I think something I did to adjust the academic standards between uni and high school was to think that it’s not too different. I think for me I found that it’s not as different from high school as it is in uni. I remember I had this one assignment where it was a biomolecular class and it was worth 8% and essentially all I had to do is just write down every experiment that I did and do a discussion for it, and I thought I found that really close to like a LAB report in chemistry or something like that. It was pretty easy to do, once you think that uni is not as difficult as high school I find that all the assignments, the exams they’re pretty easier to do instead of thinking of them as daunting. A piece of advice I would give to incoming science students is that you’re going to have a lot of fun. I feel like in high school, you’re gonna be doing a lot of different subjects that you’re probably not interested in that much. But once you go into uni and you’re doing something that you actually interested in and that you love I think you’ll find it way easier than high school. I think you’ll have a lot more fun and I really hope you do.

Ethan – Bachelor of Engineering (Honors)/Masters of Biomedical Engineering

A time where I realized that the expectations of University was far more different than those of high school was definitely a time in first year where I had to write out a formal report. There were 2 iterations of this report; a mid-term report and a final report due at the end of the course, at the end of the term. So during the mid-term report, I wrote it as I would in high school, it was a lot more informal because I had a closer relationship with my teachers at the time, so I was able to put small things in there that would make them laugh or something, and ensure a good relationship however that wasn’t really the case for university. So to give specific marks, I got maybe like a 60 for the midterm report, and seeing that and looking at feedback really helped me understand, that oh, this is a different case from high school, and I must really read through the criteria and follow it closely in order to gain a proper understanding of what they expect. And after following that, listening to their feedback, I was able to get a much better result in the final report. So my initial reactions to a unknown or unfamiliar structure or assignment was definitely, “What do I do? How should I go about understanding this assignment?” And strategies I take to fully understand the assignment is definitely, reading through the criteria and trying to understand ‘What do the examiners or what do the markers want?’ And a good strategy to undergo that is ask the marker or lecturer and really try and understand from their perspective what they expect from students and what is the best way we can cater our writing skills to properly achieve that structure. So in order to break down assignment requirements, often along with an assignment, lecturers and markers also hand out a marking criteria. So more importantly than the assignment specifications, looking at the criteria and seeing where marks are allocated, is definitely super helpful in understanding where you want to spend most of your time and what content you really got to be drawing from lecture material in order to answer the assignment to the fullest. And whenever doing an assignment, I always like to ask myself or really frame this sort of mantra when doing my assignment is, try to write your assignment with content that’s ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. So never give yourself some room or the opportunity for the eaxminer or marker to doubt your content and really ask yourself, “if I was in the shoes of the marker, what can I pick out from this answer where I can potentially deduct markers?” So tell yourself, I want my answer to be beyond reasonable doubt, fill out all the crtieria, make sure there’s no room for mistakes.

Julian – Bachelor of Psychology (Honors)

So yeah, when I came into university I definitely realised that I had to adjust my writing style because I really came in really loving my humanities side of my high school subjects. I did 4 unit English and Ancient History and those was easily my favorite subjects. And of course, in English or History, you’re allowed to write a bit more subjective or flowery I suppose. Whereas, with scientific writing, I had done biology and chemistry in high school but even then it’s a bit different in university and there’s absolutely no room for subjectivity and in a lot of ways, you’re reporting about exactly what happened and you can never use words like, you know “They had a massive finding” or something like that, they will pull you up on that straightaway. So for me, my first assignment marks that came back were a bit of a shock because I was just writing in a bit of a bloated way I suppose, whereas you want to be very concise with scientific writing. But the feedback was really comprehensive and I was able to sort of reflect on that and say, ‘Okay I need to be writing a bit more clearer and just focusing on the facts’ instead of trying to you know add more than there is to it I suppose. So I guess the biggest thing that comes to mind when I think about why concise writing in psychology is important, is I guess the idea that if you know something really well you should be able to summarize it in a sentence or two. I’m sure a lot of people have heard the idea of “Can you explain this concept to a five-year-old?” And I’d say it applies really well here, if you’ve just skimmed over a particular reference that you’re using, you’re probably going to spend a whole paragraph just trying to explain that ‘they did this, then they did that’. But if you read it critically and have more deeper understanding, you can probably explain it in a sentence or two and it’s probably going to be a lot more clear and probably going to make a lot more sense than reading through an entire paragraph of scatterbrained ‘I think they did this and I think they did that’ and that also has the really nice unintended benefit of helping with word count too. Very similar to high school, there’s going to be a word count and I’d say in university, 90% of the time people struggled to keep it under rather than struggle to hit the word limit. A lot of the time there’s more that you want to talk about so people will have to trim down a lot of words so being able to write concisely means 1) Saving your word count and 2) Just showing you have a deeper understanding, you’re able to explain things really clearly and really concisely. A strategy for me that really helps with understanding assignments and marking rubrics, is just writing everything down into a word document. So the first thing I do whenever I’m doing an assignment is to have the assignment on one side of my screen, the requirements, and I’ll just have a word doc or something up on the other side of the screen, and I’ll just read through each of the sections and basically summarize it in my own words. You know it might say this assignment requires Xyz and I will just sort of think okay you know “What do I need to accomplish that?” and I just make sure that I summarize it into a more concise way and I’ll do the same thing with the rubric too so it makes this nice little structure document that’s a lot easier to follow than the assignment sheet that they gave you. And I just find that really feel confident in you know I have my head around what’s going on and it also just forces me to properly read the assignment sheet, because if I didn’t take the notes I’d probably just skim through it and say, “Yeah I understand what they’re saying”. But when I take the time to sort of rewrite it down, it really helps me absorb what’s going and and what I need to do, and from there I’ll sort of take those notes and make a little timeline of what I need to do or how I want to structure that particular assignment.

Eamonn – Bachelor of Engineering (Honors) (Software)

I think that university assignments are a little different from high school assignments. For high school assignments, a lot of it is being able to go and show that you kind of meeting the requirements a lot of the tasks and specifications that are set out for you. Whereas for university, a lot of how you can go and personally gain marks is being able to go and show off to your markers that you understand this topic and that you’re motivated and you’re passionate enough to go and pursue the ideas further and to go and do your own sort of learning. For me, I had to go and relearn and rewrite essays for my university experience. I think because engineering is such a practical, focused discipline, that they didn’t want any sort of flair and really like flourishment in all my essays, they really wanted me to go and get really straight to the point. And there’s a huge focus in being able to go and deliver the information as concisely as possible. So I think having to go and relearn that was a bit of a struggle to me, because my entire experience with essays has always just been like just HSC English. So for me, it was like a process, of having to go and find support services, of being able to go and talk to people who had done the course before and being able to go and look at the specific examples that they had provided to go and see how my personal report should have aligned. One tip that I’d go and give to university students to go and understand and get the best mark you possibly can: is to always, always, always, build your entire assignment around the marking criteria.

Saoirse – Bachelor of Arts/Law

One thing that’s really drilled into us in all essays and all faculties, is to make sure that your language is simple. You really just want your marker to understand what you’re saying and you don’t need big fancy words to sort of convey what you’re saying. So I think that you can just build on your high school skills, what you already know, incorporate those terms that you’ve learnt but make sure you keep it simple and just say what you need to say. More often than not, you have a word limit, and so you can talk about whatever your subject might be, maybe you can talk about it forever. I know sometimes when I get really into my essays, I can just keep typing and typing, but it’s really important that you know how to direct your essay arguments and keep them concise so that you can keep it under the word limit. Because you want a short, punchy essay that can really convey what you want. It’s definitely trial and error. One strategy I like to use, is just write out everything I need to say and then I look back again and I cut down what I need to say. Because sometimes when you’re writing you can have that same thought 3 times, written in different ways and so it really just takes you know, writing it out, clarifying what you need to say and then cutting out the rest. I also love using the library for the university, because that page has so many different academic supports. They have resources on what you can write with and sort of reference, they even have like referencing help, which is really, really handy.

Peter – Bachelor of Economics/Computer Science

I’d say confused, I was very confused. The terminology they were using and also the requirements expected. If I remember the assignment well, it was a Computer Science assignment, we had to make an app of some sort and it was in Week 3, which is very very quick, university goes very quickly and so I was very confused and I was like, “Okay, how can we get this done in the 2 weeks we have?” And I sat there, spoke to some friends and then being like, “Okay, what do we do?” And then we went to the tutor and he helped us know what to do. But I find that in university, it can get confusing and overwhelming. So the best thing to do is break it down and try and utilise based on the time frame that you’ve been given. So if it’s 2 weeks, break it down and start figuring out ‘What can you do within those 2 weeks?’ and not trying to get it all done in the one day. So, I remember getting confused, like ‘Okay, I don’t understand this course, how can I do this assignment?’ So I found the best way to not feel like that these recent years has been trying to make sure that before we get an assignment, you’re knowing what the assignment is before you get it. We have this thing in university called a course outline, which actually tells you all the assignments you’re going to get, what they’re going to include, and it’s kind of like a syllabus in high school. And using that, looking at that before term starts gives you a good indication of what the assignments are going to look like when you come to class.

Sweta – Bachelor of Commerce/Law

Coming into university, my writing style was use as many words as possible, use big words to impress the marker, and just write everything that comes to your head. But in university, you’re expected to be concise and be clear with the argument that you’re making. Markers aren’t really impressed if you know big words. So adapting to this new style of writing was difficult, but it was worthwhile. In Law for example, there’s a lot of problem questions that you have to get through, and the structure for it was very different to what I was used to. And I had this one assignment and then the teacher she very specifically said, “Use concise words, that’s what I’m looking for”. So I spent most of my time on that assignment, rewording what I had written, so that it fit that structure, but in time, I’d adjusted by just practicing how to write and looking at past papers and seeing what was the writing style there so I could adjust my words to that. It takes time, but with time you do get better. Adjusting to the new writing standards is difficult, but its not impossible. It does take time and it’s easier once you understand that everyone else around you is also trying to adjust. But looking at examples of what the writing style can look like and the seeing what you might be able to do differently, helps you adjust that. Asking your tutors and your lecturers if they can provide examples also helps.