Alternative Assignments
Introduction
When you start university, you are usually overwhelmed with information about writing essays and referencing. While you’ll generally be expected to write essays during your degree, these are not the only type of assessments that you will be completing.
We asked members of the Library Student Team to tell us about some of the assessments they have faced and how they went about tackling them. They came up with this guide to alternative assessments to give you an idea of the different types of assignments you might face during the next few years.
Contents
Multiple Choice
[BA Economics & Politics] For Economics, the assessments were mostly multiple-choice questions or ‘input the right answer’ quizzes/exams. The only recommendation I have is to look at past papers and practice a lot before the quiz/exam. I found that this is the most efficient way to understand the maths behind whatever problem set I was doing.
[BSc Environmental Science] 2-hour assessment: the majority of our exams were in the format of MCQs and short answer questions. However, one assessment included six 10-markers with the remaining 40 marks for MCQs. These can be quite challenging as they require you to absorb a lot of knowledge from the lectures. The latter is especially hard because the questions tend to be a bit vague, and it can be hard to structure your answer.
[Law LLB Final Year] For some modules in 1st and 2nd year, MCQ formed a small part of our grade for those module. MCQ are often split in 2 parts:
- In the first part you have to answer questions about the law, eg “What is the definition of restrictive covenant under the Law of Property Act 1925?” and there will be 4–5 options to choose from.
- In the second part you’ll have 4–5 scenarios, with questions on each scenario, eg “Is the claimant likely to have the contract rescinded in this instance?” and there will be again 4–5 options to choose from like “Yes, because…” or “No, because….”.
I think the first section is relatively straightforward, the key is to have understood the law and have noted down key legislation, as well as principles from cases. Having a document summarising all of the things you’ve learned on the module will help. For the second section, the problems I had were the time pressure, and matching up the law relevant to that particular scenario. I made a document with all of the legislation and cases, but I do think we could have been better prepared for this.
Group Presentations
[BA Economics & Politics] Another type of assessment, common in Politics modules, is group presentations. Sometimes it is difficult to break down the assignment and delegate tasks, but constant communication with your team from the start might help. At the end of the day, everyone wants a good grade for the assignment, but it is important to make sure that the work is spread evenly, and the burden of the assignment is not falling on just one person.
[BSc Environmental Science] For some of my modules, we had to do group posters and individual presentations about the work we did. Making a scientific poster can be tricky because:
- We’ve never done them before.
- Working on it in a group can feel like a lot of pressure.
- Creation of visual content may be new to us.
[BA Economics & Politics] One of the most unusual assessments that I had to do for Politics was the creation of memes over the course of five weeks. For this assignment, we had to choose one of the required readings for the topic that week and create a meme that would reflect our knowledge of the reading and topic. The lecturer provided the support needed to do this assignment, but if students did not feel comfortable doing it, they had the chance to write a 200 words entry instead. My advice for these types of assignments would be to take advantage of the office hours.
Recorded Presentations/ Poster Presentation
[BSc Public Health] For Public Health, we had to do recorded presentations for each module, as well as an academic poster in the second semester. It definitely felt awkward hearing the sound of my own voice while recording my presentations, but what really helped was:
- writing a script for myself alongside my PowerPoint slides; and
- adding these to the notes on my PowerPoint so I could read them out during the recording.
To record my presentation I used the voice recorder on PowerPoint, where I re-recorded individual slides. This was useful because I could keep the sections of the recording that I liked, and re-do the parts I wanted to change. In terms of the academic poster, I found it useful to walk around campus and look at the posters on the walls in university buildings and take inspiration from them.
[BSc Physics] Posters are self-explanatory. In 3rd year, students normally have a module where one must solve an open problem, as well as producing a scientific poster that will be presented publicly (A1 size). This is a group project and requires design skills on top of knowledge of physics.
Lab Reports
[BSc Physics] Lab reports are essentially a writeup (1st year max 15 pages, 2nd year max 8 pages, 3rd year max 3 pages). It is a write-up of work we do in labs, and we get interviewed on the content as well. What differentiates these from essays is that they are very systematic/technical and are composed of: Introduction, Method, and Results sections. Based on this, the experiment must be reproducible in a lab by other peers.
Programming/Coding Assignments
[BSc Physics] For programming assignments, there is the classic “Here is a problem, code up a solution in X programming language”. You would have small assignments that you have 2–3 weeks to code up. Based on the week it is, the percentage of mark contributing to your final grade may vary, because the amount of content for that week may vary. There might be a final project at the end of the course that you have 3–4 weeks to complete. For this big project you usually have to write a technical report of what your code does, what your project is and then a conclusion of how it could be improved etc.
[BSc Environmental Science] Coding assignment with R: we were given 10-ish days to finish a workbook filled with questions about R and give the codes as evidence. It’s hard for students who have never used R before this module.
Coding assignment with Python: same as above but you get to choose your assignment, which is very unorthodox because usually people don’t get to choose their own exam. Additionally, having to write an essay isn’t usually what happens with Python assignments.
[BA Criminology, 2nd year] Coding coursework with RStudio/R — this module was divided into weekly quizzes which constituted 20% of the final grade, and a final coursework with coding questions made up the remaining 80%. The issue with this module is that, while support was always available and we were encouraged to ask questions, a good laptop was required. I struggled a lot with this because my laptop is an older model, and while I was able to download the software, it made my laptop freeze/restart, or the software itself did not open and I had to uninstall and reinstall it multiple times. While there are computers on campus that have this software installed, for a commuter student such as myself it is hard to come to campus everytime I need to do homework/ quizzes, especially when it is not an easy module. But if the library offered services where students could borrow laptops off campus, it’d change things for the better. My advice is to use office hours and keep up with weekly learning.
Leaflets
[BSc Physics] In 1st year there’s a module which requires a scientific literature review to be put in the format of a foldable leaflet (it can also be a page by page spread but this is how we have done ours). Again, this requires similar skills to the poster, but on a smaller scale.
Portfolios/Illustrative Assignments
[BA Architecture]- For Architecture, our assignments consisted of portfolios and illustrative assignments. We had three constant models across the degree: Studio, Humanities and Technologies. Humanities consisted of one essay-based assignment and one smaller illustrative/group project assignment. In technologies we tested and investigated buildings or fragments (either digitally or with physical models). This helped develop technical and mathematical skills. Studio was the larger module and consisted of 2 major portfolios a year. This was illustrative with annotations and text explaining your project and choices. Portfolios tracked the development of your building project from the start to the final image. Assignments could be challenging as they were subjective, one tutor may really like your design while another may dislike it. Ask for feedback on your work as it’s really important to have a broader insight on your project.
Practical Exams
[BSc Environmental Science] Practical exams: by far the hardest exam we’ve faced: the majority of the class barely passed the first one. These are open-book and involve identify rocks and their volcanic composition, identifying plants, drawing fossils, etc. This can be hard cause it’s not like a regular practical, and can be a struggle to finish within the allocated time/understand the questions.
Field Work
[BSc Environmental Science] Go to a mountain, collect results, write a 1500 word report: self-explanatory. However, people went at different times so everyone got different results, and because it was raining, a lot of people had skewed data. How do you deal with that? Don’t ask me!
Reflective Writing
[BA Economics & Politics] For Politics, the assessments were mostly essay based, but I had a couple of assignments that were not in the form of ‘Here is a question, write an essay of x number of words’. For instance, I had to write critical reflections on novels, movies, campaigns (military or others). These types of reflections require critical thinking skills and the ability of deconstructing the object, which students find daunting at the beginning. My advice is to ask the tutor to give you examples of academic journals that conduct these types of critical analyses. Also, I highly recommend trying to come up with a plan of your critical reflection and go to office hours. The questions that the tutor will ask you during office hours are actually very helpful in deepening your analysis.
[BA Criminology, 2nd year] Another peculiar assessment we had was in the form of short diary entries following the weekly learning. I liked this type of assessment as it depended on what we learned and liked from that topic, rather than just regurgitating what was in textbooks. I think the difficulty of it lied in the attending of the seminars which some students may not be able to do, as well as critically rephrasing what the lesson was about.
Exams
[BSc Environmental Science] Calculus exam: this was easy for me cause I did A-level maths cause I’m a nerd. However, the majority of my course-mates haven’t, and the course was incredibly hard for them, especially since they haven’t touched math since GCSE (it was during COVID year). How do you help people who haven’t done math since year 10?
[BA Criminology, 2nd year] All exams are remote and tend to be assignments/coursework, varying in length from 1500 words to 3000 (I think there was only one instance where we had a 4500 words coursework to submit).
[Law LLB 3rd/Final Year] For Law, assessments consisted of either a written 7-day exam, or coursework to be completed over the course of 2 weeks. The length varied between 1200–1500 words per question for the exam, and 3000–4500 words for the coursework (there may be 2–3 questions to answer for the exam). For the exam, the questions will either be problem questions or essays (or a mixture of both — if so, you’ll be able to choose if you want to do only problem questions or essays, but sometimes you’ll have to do one of each). You’ll be presented with a scenario and apply legal rules to facts, whilst in essays, a particular legal topic is explored. The key for answering problem questions is t have an understanding of the principles established in cases studied throughout the course — to help me, I made a booklet with all of the cases that were covered under a particular module, and I used that when it came to writing up the answer. For essays, the key is to explore both sides of an argument, so having read literature around a topic from a range of authors really helps. For problem questions, the main thing I struggled with was trying to adhere to the word count because I usually found myself exceeding it by 20–30%. Learning how to write succinctly was difficult, but I managed to learn how to, after writing a couple of assignments.
Literature Reviews
[History] A written assignment I’ve had that differs from a traditional essay is a literature review. This is where you reflect on the existing work that has been carried out on a particular field within your area of study and demonstrate your understanding of what has already been written. This could be highlighting key themes and arguments within the scholarship, demonstrating how sources agree or disagree with each other, or reflecting on gaps that you have identified that could be further researched. A literature review assignment during the first couple of years of your degree is often preparing you for bigger pieces of work that you carry out at the end of your degree, (most significantly your dissertation) as well as for postgraduate study if you decide to follow that route in the future.
Thanks for reading! Hope you found this helpful! We’ve linked a few useful resources below for studying on and off campus.
Useful Links:
- Library Locations and opening hours
- Bookable study spaces and group study rooms (The University of Manchester Library)
- ‘My Learning Essentials’ resources
- ‘Specialist Library Support’ resources
Assessments will be varied, so prepare to be challenged and look for support ! :)
