Students sometimes ask me how to do well in a subject. My TL;DR response is “make sure you’re clear about what the assessment expectations are”. I tell everyone this, so it’s not a secret. I’ve also been building a dataset to prove it (because, as an academic, I like to support my vibes with evidence).
Know What You Want
When I’m teaching, I try to be conscious that different students have different goals. Some take a subject because they have to, for others it’s an elective that sounds interesting, or maybe it was the only one left that fits in with their schedule. Some students love the academic environment and thrive in it, some are motivated to ‘master’ a subject, some just want to get through with as little effort as possible.
I get it. Back in the 90s, I failed a bunch of subjects in the first two years of my undergraduate degree (2y which eventually took me 4y), I failed a bunch of subjects, barely scraped through others, and accidentally got an A* (which used to be a thing) in a linguistics assessment in which I had almost zero interest, but apparently I conducted an excellent network analysis of my social group. I did lots of other things in those four years. Lots of drugs. Lots of alcohol. Lots of friends. Lots of student theatre. I excelled at student life, not so much at academic life.
Eventually, I decided I wanted to get out of Sydney and go to London, so I smashed through the rest of the degree in record time. I got my BA (in Humanities) but my transcript is a little embarrassing. Later, when I had different priorities in life, and what I wanted from my education, I performed much stronger academically. And here I am, an academic with a PhD.
The point of this story, particularly when I tell it to my students, is that I get that they have their own goals and priorities. From my point of view, the important thing for them is to be as clear and honest as possible about what those are, then put in as much effort as required to meet those goals – which ideally involves passing my subject.
Failing subjects these days has a lot more consequences for students, particularly for international students. But that doesn’t mean I wave everyone through. Instead, I try and focus on helping students meet their goals, whatever they are.
How Not To Fail
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been experimenting with different assessment and examination practices. Part of the motivation is creating better learning environments. Also important is ensuring that the assessments I set allow students to demonstrate genuine learning outcomes – basically I don’t want to be reading oodles of mediocre ChatGPT nonsense.
Back in my day, even passing required basic effort, so I guess I’m trying to find that standard in the modern university. I want students who are really into my subjects to thrive and have a great experience. I also want those enrol for other reasons to get what they need and not be bored shitless.
Here are my two lowkey hacks for doing well in my subjects (however you may define ‘well’):
- Spend at least an hour a week in Canvas (our online learning site)
- Contact the subject coordinator to clarify your approach to assessments
One aspect of the modern university is that we have online learning sites, which contain subject outlines, overviews of each week, recorded lectures, links to readings, tutorial slides and materials, extra learning materials – SO MUCH STUFF. The days of having a big binder for each subject with readings and notes and highlighting are over, (unless you’re into that kind of thing – right, Sylvie? Abigail?).
Yes, students need to conduct research on particular cases or examples for their assessments, but all of the concepts, theories and frameworks are in one place. And an hour each week isn’t long at all. If students are in the site during the tutorial each week – following along, engaging with tutorial activities, etc. – they would clock over an hour. And yet so many don’t. This semester, one of my students spent a total 51 minutes and 47 seconds in the online learning site across the semester.
Details about assessments are also on Canvas. I endeavour to be thorough when setting out an assessment task and what it is expected to be done to complete it. This includes a recommended structure, and also a recommendation that students email me in advance with their planned approach or ideas for an assessment.
This email, ideally, is just a few bullet points or a short paragraph. In my advocacy and social change subjects, for example, a common assessment involves writing about how different groups advocate around a specific issue and connecting this to one of the theoretical frameworks we’ve done in class. So, an email from a student might say, “I want to look at how the No Campaign in the Voice Referendum through the lens of Fraser’s Redistribution and Recognition lens;” Or “I want to write about advocacy around women’s rights.”
Based on what students send I provide feedback to guide them in the right direction. For that first email, probably the only thing I’d suggest is that they identify the ‘decision-maker’ or ‘audience’ for the Referendum, which is different from how we tend to talk about advocacy in other contexts (where the target decision-maker might be a Minister or CEO). With the second email, I’d encourage them to first be more specific about the issue (e.g. equal pay in corporations or safe access to reproductive health services), about who the advocates might be, and which theory they would use. The initial response would inevitably include a suggestion of (re)reading the task in Canvas.
The Results
So basically, my hypothesis has been that reading some of the course materials and considering the assessment task carefully is a key to success. I used: (1) time spent in the Canvas site (5h over 5 weeks leading up to Assessment 1 as a proxy for engagement with subject materials, and (2) students contacting me about the assessment (either via email or asking in a tutorial) as an indicator of having thought about what the expectations were.
The assessment task I used was a 1000 word written essay or report, completed by 76 students earlier this year. Basically, I compared the assessment results with whether students had contacted me about the assessment in advance, and whether they had spent 5 hours or less in the subject learning site in the 5 weeks leading up to submitting the assessment.
Table 1. Assessment Results
| Highest Grade | 28.5(/30) | 95% |
| Lowest Grade | 9 | 30% |
| Average Grade | 20 | 67% |
| Contact Subject Coordinator | 45 | 59% |
| Spend 5h or less in Canvas | 47 | 62% |
Out of the 76 students who submitted, 45 (59%) contacted me for feedback on their assessment before submitting; only 29 (38%) had spent an average of more than one hour in the online learning management system, Canvas.
Table 2. Analysis Results
| Students who: | Ave. grade | Range |
| consulted with the subject coordinator (n=45) | 70% | 30-95% |
| spent more than 5h total in Canvas (n=29) | 73% | 40-95% |
| BOTH consulted with the subject coordinator AND spent over 5h in Canvas (n=18) | 76% | 58-95% |
| NEITHER consulted with subject coordinator NOR spent over 5h in Canvas (n=20) | 60% | 33-95% |
Some important findings here:
- There are successful students (received a High Distinction (85-100%) in all of the categories. So, students can succeed whether they listen to me or not.
- Conducting one of the two activities (consulting and time spent online) slightly increased the chance of doing better, but there was still a chance of failure. Only conducting both activities resulted in no failures. So, if students do what I recommend, they probably won’t fail.
- The difference between the average grade for students who conducted both activities (76%) and those who conducted neither (60%), is the difference between passing a subject (50-64%) and getting a distinction (75-84%). So, if students do what I recommend, they are more likely to get a ‘good’ grade.
It’s worth noting a few things here. First, this data is from one assessment in one subject in one semester. I’ need to do this a couple more time to be very confident in the results. I should also consider potential bias in the data, i.e., do the results only occur because I conducted the experiment? Would that make this Schrödinger’s Class?
Conclusion
The modern university is a strange place. Students are lured in with flashy marketing campaigns then crammed into overcrowded classrooms, for which they pay a pretty premium. Academics are incentivised / performance managed with poorly conceived teaching and research metrics that wouldn’t get past peer review. Executives who have no idea what students or academics do on a day-to-day basis push through changes like ditching faculty teaching and research support teams while crowing about ‘research excellence’ and the ‘student experience’, all so they can say they implemented efficiencies when they are interviewing for their next management role.
One of the things that gets me through is my colleagues, the teachers, researchers and support staff, the people who actually enable, conduct and create excellent research and learning environments. I also love being in the classroom and supporting students to reach their goals, even if that’s just passing the subject. As I was saying to a colleague today (who was helping me plan changes to one of my subjects for next year), one of the basic things I try to pass on to everyone is the importance of being clear about the expectations of the task in front of you. If you can’t read the requirements of an assessment task (that you are paying to do) and attempt to fulfil them, you’re probably not going to be able to effectively meet the requirements of your future managers, employers or clients (who you are going to want to pay you).
And come on, an hour a week of study outside of tutorial time (or even inside tutorial time) really isn’t much of a commitment.
