In Final Examinations, Quality of Essay Plan Correlates with The Essay Mark

Abstract

Despite issues over the assigning definitive marks to essays (Bloxham et al., 2015), they remain a key assessment tool in many programmes (Scouller et al., 2008). Course work is often constructed using word processors but, essays written in end of year examinations are traditionally hand written and time limited, despite evidence that different skills are required (Mogey & Fluck, 2014). We investigated whether planning, that has been suggested to positively contribute to essay quality (Hounsell, 1984), correlated with the mark awarded to the essay. The method was a post‐hoc examination of a complete set of recent final examination scripts for the three Units of the Physiological Sciences programme. Ignoring the mark sheet, so as to remain blind to the mark awarded, each essay booklet was examined to establish if there was an essay plan. Plans were graded according to a four point criteria with a maximum total of 10 marks: Title present = 0 to 1 mark Structure evident = 0 to 2 marks Scope of theplan= 0 to 4 marks Reference works listed = 0 to 3 marksAfter the plans were evaluated, the mark awarded for each essay (the mean of two marks) were taken from the official records of the examination. The essays that did not have a plan were excluded from the analysis.Overall there were 104 essays that qualified. The marks for plan and essay were both normally distributed. The marks for the plan had an average of 4.1 (range 1 to 10) and for the essay the average was 63.8% (range 42 to 94%). Evidence of an association between the mark given for the essay and the plan was determined by a Pearson correlation analysis. A statistically significant non‐zero correlation was found to exist (p<0.001). The Pearson correlation coefficient (r2), which indicates the degree of correlation, was 0.57.In summary, there is a statistically robust correlation between the mark awarded to the essay plan and the mark independently awarded to the essay. The mark awarded to the plan and the mark awarded to the essay were normally distributed and showed a positive correlation with an r2 value greater than 0.5, which is a large effect. The data support the assertion that students who plan their structure of their essay achieve higher marks despite the loss of writing time. Ongoing work will test the hypothesis that planning improves performance in written argument.