I said a few things in my last post about essay marking criteria. Each institution uses different marking criteria, but generally speaking it is quite unusual to get much more than 70% for a piece of work at a British university. This often worries students as they may be used to getting much higher marks. If you get 70% or higher then you really are doing very well indeed, the most common mark will be 50 – 60%. For all of you essay writers out there in this post I am directing you to an example set of essay marking criteria which comes from the University of Westminster. If you haven’t seen criteria like this before then it should be very useful for you to see what your lecturers are looking for. What you need to do is read the criteria carefully and then interpret what these features really mean in your piece of work. For example one of the criteria is:
‘Good use of direct quotations which generally follow conventions.’
This means that simply following the rules about how to use direct quotations will earn you marks (not sure? Look up my post on ‘referencing’). Read Westminster University’s essay marking criteria here.