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How easy is it to pass a university essay?

I have my first graded essay due in a few weeks and was reading through the guidance. It has a section on marking focus and I'm not sure if I'm interpreting it correctly? It makes it sound as though getting a pass is very easy (you would have to do exceptionally bad to fail) but obviously that the top grades would be really hard to get (anything over 60%).
The comments it gives for achieving a fail are things like:
Makes incoherent arguments, information is inaccurate or unsuitable, very limited or no use made of background reading material and poor use of language with significant spelling errors.


Is this fairly common for universities? How did you find your first ever university essay? Any tips for a first time essay?

Thanks :smile:
(edited 8 years ago)
Original post by student2312
I have my first graded essay due in a few weeks and was reading through the guidance. It has a section on marking focus and I'm not sure if I'm interpreting it correctly? It makes it sound as though getting a pass is very easy (you would have to do exceptionally bad to fail) but obviously that the top grades would be really hard to get (anything over 60%).
The comments it gives for achieving a fail are things like:
Makes incoherent arguments, information is inaccurate or unsuitable, very limited or no use made of background reading material and poor use of language with significant spelling errors.


Is this fairly common for universities? How did you find your first ever university essay? Any tips for a first time essay?

Thanks :smile:


I'd say it's true that for most courses you'd have to try pretty hard to completely fail an assignment if you hand it in.

Having said that, that doesn't mean you should just cruise through your degree being happy with getting passes.

When you get your mark back from your essay, make sure to take any feedback on board from your lecturer and go speak to them about where you can improve :h:
At my uni you only need to get a D grade to pass however for whatever reason they are very critical
yeah I think to actually fail (i.e. under 40%) you'd basically have to hand in a blank sheet of paper or nothing at all
Reply 4
You have to be pretty incompetent to fail. I've certainly seen it happen, but that tended to be people who left it to the night before the deadline and knocked out a shoddy piece of nonsense from lecture slides in an all-nighter without doing any research of their own. Plus the old chestnut of thinking they could copy & paste from Wikipedia and nobody would notice.

Bear in mind that your first year is an apprenticeship. You're just getting to grips with what uni work is like, so you can view the first few assessed assignments as a learning experience.
To simply pass (so to get 40%) is easy (I know no one who hasn't got 40% in an essay- even people who missed lots of lectures and did it last minute). But you should really try and aim for 60% as this is considered a good mark
I agree with everyone else. Passing an assignment is so easy, gaining 60%+ is a lot harder than it seems, but also incredibly doable.

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