Should lecturers be so fussy about Referencing styles

I use the Microsoft Office Referencing tool to collate my Reference list and Bibliography. When completing a piece of work the other day I forgot to change the default style to Harvard 2008 Anglia. I think it was set to APA or similar. On receiving my work back I got quite a poor grade and the comments on the work were mostly about how I hadn't referenced correctly.

Do people not think that the quality of the work should be the thing being marked, not whether or not there was a full stop in the wrong place in a reference or citation?

Reply 1

SillyEddy

Their lecture, their rules?

I agree they can put some odd importance onto those sorts of things, but it's an assessment and must surely fit the criteria?

Sometimes I just have to make a hybrid/bodged reference because our university specific guide doesn't have all the eventualities in it. Sometimes they matter, sometimes they don't. With references, provided you can make out the general idea of what it is an where it's from, I don't think it should matter hugely... But the systems are there for a reason I guess.

Reply 2

Craghyrax

Its a big mistake to think that the comments you got in your feedback are strongly correlated to your result. As someone who marks undergraduate essays, there is no way I have the time or indeed the space to list ALL the things that are wrong in an essay, and to fully explain why I give the grade that I do. I stick with mentioning things that the student can learn how to improve on for next time.
So I would very much doubt if your bad grade was just because of referencing. That's not how marking works.

Reply 3

smd4std

maybe your work just sucked?

Probably

Personally I don't think so, bar your dissertation. Though tbh ours aren't hugely fussy, there are a few nuances between different Harvard styles, as in whether it's a full stop or comma after the list of authors to separate them from the year of publication, if the publication year is in brackets or not etc. Also despite technically having to put the url and access date for journal articles read online, they never seem to flag that up and tbh It must be expected that the online databases are where folks get basically all of their articles from.

But I mean I doubt that got you a bad grade, not sure if your university states on assignment briefs/marking guidelines what it's worth, but for us structure and grammar/spelling/referencing are worth 10% all together, so pretty minor.

Reply 6

username858757

My department don't particularly care what referencing style you use, as long as its consistent within a single piece of work (e.g. don't abbreviate some journals but not others).

I don't see the point of forcing a style particularly, but judging by the posts on TSR lots of departments are strict about this.

As long as you order it as <authors, date, title, journal, volume, issue, page, doi> I don't see how it matters whether you put the date in brackets or not. (*pre-emptive* If you're going to go on and publish as a postgrad or later, I would hope that you'll be smart enough to follow the journal style without it being drilled into you during undergrad).

Reply 7

Aurora.

I think so. Our lecturers are always saying they're preparing us to be scientists... There's no point in not learning about strict referencing rules until your paper gets rejected from a publication. I guess it's a similar idea in other types of degrees - referencing just is strict when you're publishing stuff professionally - there's no point in not being strict with undergraduates, we're here to learn.

Should lecturers be so fussy about Referencing styles

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