university exam essay tips

university exam essay tips

Effective Strategies for Excelling in University Exam Essays

1. Introduction to University Exam Essays

It assumes, in other words, that student and instructor can cooperate in maintaining or increasing the learning and assessment functions of the essay. I believe that there is considerable scope for increasing what the instructor assesses and what you learn from exams at the same time as there is also, and at the same time, some scope for decreasing what is often viewed as the plague of student essay exams – injunctions to regurgitate the content of the course. Satisfying instructors that you have learned is actually the best thing you can do to make your own learning easier, more enjoyable, and more permanent!

So, you are taking a course in political science at university? Part of your success in such a course will involve writing essays – the greater the part, the luckier you are! Political scientists, including those who are lecturing, typically dislike essay exams just as much as do their students. Nevertheless, they serve as a very effective learning, as well as an assessment, device. This guide is built around the assumption that there are things that you, as a student, can do to raise the quality of your essay exam answers without in any way working against the interests of your instructor.

2. Understanding the Essay Prompt

Understanding the meaning of these directives can often affect the result of an essay. Keep away from penalizing responses to your essay requirements by taking the time to understand the goal of the essay. It is not unusual for documents to require a general response from the student instead of being written to rationalize. Remember that the intent of the essay is to evaluate what you have done on the subject. What essay requests are fully suitable and they are aimed at the author to determine its knowledge on a specific topic and address that knowledge to the essay in topic. Decide what the essay must achieve. This encourages students to read directly about the subject and decide what concepts are relevant. If an aspect of the prompt is too difficult to understand, interpret the issue and recognize intended criteria. Highlight any inquiries or concerns you have with your guide/TA.

Once you grasp the essay prompt, understanding the instructions will be your next task. It’s very crucial for every student to understand what the essay prompt is requiring and for the points to be written in the essay. If you don’t understand the requirements of the essay prompt, then there is a probability that you’ll be penalized or can say the outcome of the essay will be affected. By evaluating the essay prompt, you will get a good idea of the essay’s approach and content. So, understanding the required information which is to be added in the essay is the fundamental step of your essay writing. It will also assist you in setting the tone and degree of difficulty necessary for your assigned work. Determining the actions you should undergo to satisfy the instructor’s standards is one key part of understanding the essay prompt. For each aspect listed or alluded to in the essay prompt, the next will assist you in understanding this phase of the essay writing process.

3. Structuring Your Essay

The increasing complexity of what we want to say is making us look at the remainder of the essay rather than the individual paragraphs. This is bad psychology; our perception of the world generally starts at the broad and vague end and extends to the specific. This is also the way examinees perceive an essay. So let’s slow down and illustrate the process of writing an essay by looking at paragraphs. To make things a bit more manageable, let’s take our definition of a good essay by looking at one which lasts for around 1,000–1,500 words or so. This might seem a very brief length for all we want to do, but remember that the first accepted printers were the Greeks of the classical period. They presented us with no books or chapters. All they did was break up the text with paragraphing. Considering how brief much of our examination writing is, organizing thought over such short stretches of text seems a bit more manageable.

The next stage in our essay writing involves moving from asking the type of questions we can answer in a paragraph each to considering how to form paragraphs into a logical and coherent sequence. One point that is certainly worth showing is that good writing is also logical writing. Writing has its own logic; a good piece of writing is designed so that wherever the reader looks (or listens in the case of spoken English) she can see the author’s meaning clearly. English is not alone in using paragraphs to organize thought. Other European languages, such as French and German, use this device and have the same word for it – paragraphe in French and paragraph in German. The ancient Arabic language, particularly in the epistolographic style, provides yet another example showing an awareness and use of paragraphing.

4. Research and Evidence

If you cut your reading short and read only a section of something for time reasons, then your discussion will be woefully abbreviated. Examiners can recognize work that is a little unprepared; it reflects a lack of understanding, lack of engagement with the materials, and spurious pattern making and generalization. Examiners recognize when there is a shallow level of thinking accompanying the written ideas. However, you should have confidence that the ideas which you will be thinking through the day before the exam will bear fruit during the examination. That is why, despite its time-consuming nature, research should be at the top of your to-do list.

For instance, when you have finished reading an article or book, you should have what your lecturer calls “a chapter full of annotations,” which refers to countless pencil marks and written comments in the margins, along with highlighted sections. When you have read an area, you should be able to think about it, translate it into your own words if necessary, answer “why” questions, and have all the details at your fingertips.

The day before your exam, it is too late to start researching. You should have done this over the past few weeks. However, you may have become overheated or anxious during that time. It is not uncommon for students to take shortcuts and not spend enough time reading and researching so that they understand or fully take into account all aspects of their text.

5. Writing and Revising Techniques

Be careful, subtle, and cautious with your arguments. Be attentive not only to the facts in your argument but also to the nuance and sophistication it presents. Make sure your analysis extends as fully as the evidence allows. You should situate your argument in the body of scholarship or discourse in the field by using academic sources to support your argument, but do not hide behind the words of others. Be honest about context and address counterarguments. Finally, choose your words and create a voice for yourself that sounds like you but is educated and informed. With that done, do a last-minute check for grammar, mechanics, and citation style. If you follow the tips contained in this manual, your next few essays should be much easier and markedly more successful.

A good university essay should be revised at least once, if not more. A clean, well-formatted, organized paper is far easier to read and grade, and has a better chance to succeed. When it comes to revising, a little humility goes a long way. After writing, take a break and then revise with fresh eyes. It sometimes helps to reverse the revision process, examining the conclusion first and then reading backward passage by passage, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence. But you need to be ready to revise substantive matters as well, and these may be handled in different stages.