After marking the assignments, the following recommendations are made to help students improve their performance in future

essay-type assignments/dissertations. These are based on the weaknesses identified from various scripts, especially those who score 60% and below although a few of the recommendations apply equally to some of those who scored above 60%. The first weakness is the lack of command of the English language and students need to address this issue in order to achieve higher marks in future assignments and/or dissertations. Students need to differentiate academic language from spoken language which was a common mistake. For example some students used expressions like they dont care about staff thinking to mean they do not consider what staff think or they do not consider staff contributions. Students need to avoid sentences that do not make any sense at all, like And it gives different form the nations to evaluate - (these are actual phrases that were found in assignments). In the same way, many students used very long sentences and often end up with confusing and contradictory arguments or meanings. It is recommended that students with these problems should attend the weekly English classes run by the EISU. The English for International Students Unit run weekly classes to assist students who need extra support. Any student who has been penalised for poor English should attend these classes as it is difficult to improve by your own efforts. The second weakness is poor referencing. Most of the student cohort had some elements of poor referencing, and therefore lessons need to the learnt. Although students were advised that using the work of others is acceptable practice, failure to reference the author is prohibited (this is plagiarism), some students still failed to reference others work properly. On the other hand, many students only put forward their own ideas/opinions throughout the assignment without any supporting argument/finding from the literature. Students need to avoid writing an essay in this manner which is essentially a literature survey. Students also failed to include in their in-text references the page number when making direct quotations; some included web links in their in-text references which is not appropriate. Also, although students were advised against nonacademic references such as Wikipedia, some still used such references. A few students used very limited references which of course reduces the scope of their arguments and the quality of their assignment. Almost every student failed to use the referencing format required for the assignment which also shows some lack of effort from the students.

The third weakness is the lack of experience in academic writing resulting in very poor structure of some sections or even the whole assignment. To address this I advise students to attend some of the sessions run be the EISU on academic writing. I am aware that there are Dissertation sessions run for the MSc students, and I advise students to make good use of these sessions and the materials provided. The final weakness is the lack of research effort on the part of the students. It is clear that some of the students have undertaken very limited effort on the assignment despite the extensive time-period of the assignment (10 weeks) and various support sessions that were provided (including 2 full sessions to go through the requirements of the assignment). Other minor problems included, for some students, very basic grammatical errors throughout the assignment which shows that the students did not spend sufficient time to proof reading their work, or they left the assignment until last minute. The layout requirements were also not followed by many students. Students cannot expect to earn good marks without a good piece of work being submitted. All it takes is a reasonable amount of effort. Students who want to earn good marks need to appreciate that it can only be done by investing time, effort and energy into the assignment No pain No gain. Hopefully this experience will enable you to begin to prepare yourself for the dissertation.