No one can sit down and write the perfect essay in one shot. These things take effort, brainpower, and a significant amount of patience. Consider these steps for producing a well-written, thoughtful response to any essay prompt:.
There are three types of personal essays: the personal statement, the school statement, and the creative or intellectual statement. These are described below. Responding to Short Answer and Essay Questions.
Short Answer Questions Short answer questions are almost harder to write than a personal essay, since you usually have a word limit. Answer honestly. Colleges want to get to know you. Always use details to bring even a short story to life. Write out your answer without worrying about the length and then go back and delete any unnecessary information.
Underline the stand-out points and trim the rest. Describe your personal growth. When discussing an activity or event in your life, ask yourself what you learned or took away from it. Be specific about each institution. If asked why you want to attend a particular school, make sure to reference any times you visited the campus, met with admissions counselors, or spoke with current students or alumni.
Talk about programs that interest you and how you think they will benefit you in the future. Tell your readers why the idea of being a student at their institution excites you. Consider these steps for producing a well-written, thoughtful response to any essay prompt: Get moving.
The best way to activate your mind is to activate your body. The act of moving forward, whether you are on foot or on a bike, can help you work through the ideas that might feel stuck. Just as all essay questions require an answer in the form of an argument, all require you to exercise your judgement or powers of discrimination in determining what is relevant or not, significant or not, authentic or not.
Once you have a clear sense of what the question is asking you to do, take a few minutes to plan your answer. This planning can take many forms. For short answer questions, you may just need to jot down a couple of key terms on your exam paper. For essay questions, you will likely need to do more planning. You might start by brainstorming ideas or different perspectives.
Remember, you are aiming for a very rough sketch of your answer: use whatever outlining method you are comfortable with — mind map or conventional hierarchical structure. You may also want to use a chart that lists your main points across from supporting examples rather than a formal outline.
This outline provides your response with a focus and clear structure. Remember that your professor is reading dozens and dozens of exam papers; your goal is to highlight for him or her that you have fully answered the question as clearly as possible. Begin an essay answer with a very clear thesis statement that directly responds to the question. Start all paragraphs with a clear topic sentence that explains the main point that you will develop.
When writing responses to short answer and essay questions, it is important to recognize that arguments and evidence are less valuable when they are separated from one another. A response that lists a long string of facts but that fails to interpret or explain these facts is just as flawed as a response that contains many interesting ideas but that does not support these ideas with specific examples.
To avoid these flaws, you need to find a balance between argument and evidence. Be as specific as possible. Most exam questions will address general course themes, issues that anyone who attended the lectures would be familiar with.
To excel on an exam, therefore, you must establish that you are not merely acquainted with these themes, but that you have considered them carefully and are aware of their connections to and ramifications for the more particular material discussed in the course.
In a literature course, this means numerous references to the texts studied; in a history course, it might mean using a specific historical event to illustrate a broader theory. In psychology, the student might make reference to relevant experiments, in geography to particular landmarks.
Leave the questions on a line by itself. Use your version to help you revise the question, as needed, and to estimate how much time students will need to complete the question. If you can answer the question in ten minutes, students will probably need twenty to thirty minutes.
Use these estimates in determining the number of questions to ask on the exam. Give students advice on how much time to spend on each question. Decide which specific facts or ideas a student must mention to earn full credit and how you will award partial credit. Below is an example of a holistic scoring rubric used to evaluate essays:. Try not to bias your grading by carrying over your perceptions about individual students.
Before you begin grading, you will want an overview of the general level of performance and the range of students' responses. Identify exams that are excellent, good, adequate, and poor. Use these papers to refresh your memory of the standards by which you are grading and to ensure fairness over the period of time you spend grading.
Shuffle papers before scoring the next question to distribute your fatigue factor randomly. By randomly shuffling papers you also avoid ordering effects. Don't let handwriting, use of pen or pencil, format for example, many lists , or other such factors influence your judgment about the intellectual quality of the response.
Write brief notes on strengths and weaknesses to indicate what students have done well and where they need to improve. The process of writing comments also keeps your attention focused on the response.
And your comments will refresh your memory if a student wants to talk to you about the exam. Focus on the organization and flow of the response, not on whether you agree or disagree with the students' ideas. Experiences faculty note, however, that students tend not to read their returned final exams, so you probably do not need to comment extensively on those. Most faculty tire after reading ten or so responses. Take short breaks to keep up your concentration. Also, try to set limits on how long to spend on each paper so that you maintain you energy level and do not get overwhelmed.
However, research suggests that you read all responses to a single question in one sitting to avoid extraneous factors influencing your grading for example, time of day, temperature, and so on. Wait two days or so and review a random set of exams without looking at the grades you assigned. Rereading helps you increase your reliability as a grader. If your two score differ, take the average.
This protects students' privacy when you return or they pick up their tests. Returning Essay Exams. A quick turnaround reinforces learning and capitalizes on students' interest in the results.
Try to return tests within a week or so. Give students a copy of the scoring guide or grading criteria you used. Let students know what a good answer included and the most common errors the class made. If you wish, read an example of a good answer and contrast it with a poor answer you created. Give students information on the distribution of scores so they know where they stand. This takes time, which should be accounted for in the total time to complete the assessment.
References generally would not count towards the word count. Include clear marking guidelines for referencing in rubrics, including assessing skills such as critical thinking and evaluation of information. Let students know how to check the word count in their submission: Show word count in Inspera — question type: Essay. In Canvas Quizzes, the word count of Essay questions appears as a counter in the bottom-right of the screen.
In Word, the word count of a document can be viewed at the bottom-left of the screen. See also. Design questions Design test questions for equivalence, accessibility and open-book exams.
Design questions. Design multi-choice questions Write MCQs that assess reasoning, rather than recall. Design MCQs. Send us some feedback Please let us know how we can improve this content.
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