Assessing Student Writing
This section of the website aims to develop staff and student understanding of the strengths and weaknesses in postgraduate academic writing. As a framework, we have used the MASUS Proceedure, a set of criteria formulated at the University's Learning Centre. To illustrate strengths and weakness we asked students in a postgraduate unit of study to rank themselves on the criteria and their sub-criteria. The results are presented below.
Use of source material
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+
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-
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| Selecting relevant information |
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X |
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Interpreting and intergrating evidence
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X |
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| Avoiding plagiarism by summarizing and paraphrasing |
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X
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Notetaking in lectures and from texts
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X |
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| Separating authors' ideas from your own |
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X
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| Using disciplinary citation styles |
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X
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| Structure and development of the text |
+
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-
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Writing an academic essay
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X
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Writing an article review
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X |
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Writing a report
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X |
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Writing an annotated bibliography
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X |
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Writing a literature review
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X |
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Writing a thesis statement and topic sentences
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X
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Integrating flow of ideas
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X |
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Grammatical development
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+
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-
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Using subject verb agreement
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X |
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| Using articles |
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X |
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Using tenses
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X |
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Using conjunctions and connectives
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X |
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Using active and passive voice
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X
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Using sentence structure and punctuation
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X |
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Using vocabulary
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X |
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Academic style
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+
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-
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Writing in a formal style
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X |
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Understanding how to paragraph
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X
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