Beyond the Essay? Innovation and Tradition in Assessment Practice in English
Studies
Jonathan Gibson (English Subject Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London)
Conference theme: Innovation
This paper shares its title with a conference I helped to organise last December with Victoria
Bazin and Rosie White of the AsKE CETL at Northumbria University. The question mark in
that title is important. The aim of our conference was not so much to debunk the essay and
agitate for its overthrow as to explore the developing relationship between essays and other
forms of assessment. This is a timely topic. Consistently, the National Student Survey has
highlighted student dissatisfaction with assessment practices. In English (as in other
subjects), the section on ‘Assessment and Feedback’ in the 2008 survey produced lower
scores than other sections. Pressures on the 21st-century HE system—rising student
numbers and developments in the discourses of teaching and learning—mean that many
universities are seeking to encourage departments to vary their assessment diet. In English
Studies, the last few years have seen a significant growth in the use of innovative forms of
assessment (several of which I’ll be talking about in this presentation). The essay, however,
remains in a privileged place at the heart of assessment practices in the discipline: even in
departments which make heavy use of other forms of assessment, a certain amount of
essay-writing remains compulsory.
This state of affairs is neatly caught in the shift in emphasis between the first version of the
English benchmark statement (from 2001) and the second, current version. The earlier
statement said: ‘In order to develop and demonstrate the skills identified above, to engage
in informed written debate and to present ideas in a sustained discursive form, English
students should be required to write essays as a fundamental part of their learning
experience [my emphasis]’. In the second version, whilst the first part of the sentence
remains the same, the final requirement changes: instead essay-writing, the expectation is
that students ‘engage in informed written analysis and…present ideas in a sustained
discursive form.’
When first setting up the conference, I wondered whether there would be any appetite for the
whole-scale replacement of the essay by other forms of assessment. After all, what English
degrees teach is in theory not essay-writing per se so much as engagement with literary
texts—and surely there are lots of ways of testing engagement with literary texts that do not
involve the writing of essays. In the event, however, nobody at the conference unequivocally
suggesting getting rid of essays altogether. Why?
The appeal of the essay for English lecturers has always centred on its flexibility and
openness. The fact that the essay is a genre with no particular implied reader and, in English
Studies, no rigidly prescribed structure, means that it is—in theory—open to intelligent
exploitation by the best students. The essay allows its writer to set the agenda—to make
what they will of the topic in hand. Behind this enthusiasm for formlessness and informality is
the high valuation English as a discipline places on student originality and independence.
This is the basis on which the strongest advocates of the essay at the conference argued.
Kevin Morris’s enthusiasm for the essay was coupled with hostility to other types of
assessment. He argued that writing essays provided students with the unique opportunity to
embark on a transformative ‘journey from the familiar to the unfamiliar’. Unlike the essay, he
argued, ‘new modes of assessment…pander to an orthodoxy that denies access to all but a
cultural elite to the dominant and powerful positions in society.’
Aled Williams and Dave Ellis, in a paper they were unfortunately unable to give at the
conference, begin at the same starting-point as Morris, but ended up at a diametricallyopposed conclusion. They argue that the essay uniquely tests what they suggest (drawing
on the work of Meyer and Land) are ‘threshold concepts’ for English: core but troublesome
learning outcomes such as the ability to make creative and original interpretive judgments
and the practice of close analytic reading. Whilst Morris feels that these skills are uniquely
developed and tested in the writing of essays, Williams and Ellis think they are best taught
initially by small-scale assessment tasks, each measuring one or two threshold outcomes.
These tasks are the best way, Williams and Ellis argue, ‘to prepare students for undertaking
what the essay alone is able to assess: the ability to combine [a range of skills and
attributes] in the creation of an appropriate and original writing structure for an exploratory
argument.’
What I have to say in the rest of this paper will make it clear that I agree with Williams and
Ellis rather more than with Morris: I will suggest that an analysis of exactly what attributes
English lecturers want to develop in their student should guide assessment design and
propose that a range of different types of assessment are a good way to develop these
attributes.
On the face of it, the flexibility of the essay would seem to give undergraduates an ideal,
opportunity to develop intellectual independence. In the past, this was sometimes the case.
Though much of the time the reality diverged dramatically from the ideal, the institutional
contexts of what we might call an ‘old-school’ approach to essay-writing were certainly
hospitable to this sort of deep learning—factors such as:
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Small tutor-led seminar groups.
Automatic and lengthy one-to-one tutorial feedback on essays.
First-year undergraduates already au fait with the conventions of academic essay
writing.
Students personally committed to their academic discipline.
Limited opportunities for plagiarism.
Long, unmodularised courses the only summative assessment for which was an endof-year exam—all other assessments for which were therefore formative and,
potentially, developmental
Lecturers not hidebound by the need to maximise their research time
These factors made possible, at least theoretically, a close, pastoral collaboration between
tutor and student: ideally, a freeform, continuous dialogue allowing the student to try out and
develop her own ideas and, simultaneously, her writing skills. The current HE situation is, of
course, very different. Today, therefore, the openness of the essay form—its strength—is
now also its weakness. Scaffolding that was (albeit in a piecemeal way) available to HE in
the past in the form of long-term, small-scale pastoral support must now be provided from
other sources.
The way forward, I think, is for English lecturers to be, like Williams and Ellis, more specific
about the skills they value and are trying to develop in their students. Thinking in a focused
way about what they want their students to be able to do will help lecturers design
assessments that will help their students to do those things. To bring this point home, the
rest of this paper will be divided into four sections, each focusing on a particular set of
subject-specific capabilities, aptitudes or attributes that I believe all English lecturers would
like to encourage in their students: reading skills; skills in gathering information; skills in
constructing arguments; and writing skills. In each section, I will describe assessment
methods showcased at the Beyond the Essay conference that I think are particularly
effective at developing the relevant skill in English students.
A: Developing skills in reading literature
Perhaps the key skill students of English literature need to learn is how to move from
emotionally-charged first impressions (positive or negative) of a book to the kind of analytical
evaluation that will get them good marks. In the past—when high theory was in its pomp—
this non-academic, fuzzy aspect of student reading was devalued and undermined—
dismissed as naïve, ‘humanist’ and so on. The picture is now different, and many lecturers
now seek to use subjective engagement with the text in a productive way, to develop
students’ reading skills.
Several lecturers spoke at the conference about methods of getting students to reflect upon
their initial reactions to a text, something that can be very helpful to students in developing
and articulating their ideas. Catherine Maxwell (Queen Mary, University of London) reported
on the use of logbooks by students taking a a module on Late Victorian Literature to
comment on their reading, in-class experiences and homework. Anne Schwan and SarahPatricia Wasson (Napier University) described the use of reading diaries on a level 3 module
in literary theory. The reading diaries were introduced as a way to combat plagiarism and
prevent student drop-out. The idea was that making the process and difficulties of reading
theory explicit would make it easier for students to grasp the material. The instructions
Schwan and Wasson gave to students were very reassuring: ‘I want to assure you,’ Wasson
writes, ‘that even lecturers find this reading difficult, even those us like Anne Schwan and I
who adore theory…Please never think that you are stupid for not ‘understanding’ this difficult
prose. All that is required of you is enthusiasm, diligence and a willingness to read and reread the set passages extremely carefully before you come to class. Then we can work
together on clarifying these subtle ideas.’
A particularly experimental use of reflective techniques was described by Richard Kerridge
(Bath Spa). On a module on Practical Criticism and Close Reading, Kerridge asked students
not to write reflectively on current set texts, but to choose a literary work that had had a
powerful effect on them in the past and to reflect upon that in a ‘narrative of reading’,
including details of when and where they read it, what else was happening significantly in
their lives at the time and what in their long-term experience and taste could account for the
powerful effect of that particular text. The students were asked to link the material to a close
account of what it was in the text that they found so powerful, including something about its
literary form.
As my colleague at the Subject Centre, Ben Knights, has pointed out, we want our students
to take pleasure in language, to enjoy words and to pay attention to style and register and to
texts’ relationships with their audiences. We also want them to approach their reading
flexibly, holding different possibilities/interpretations in their mind simultaneously, to tolerate
uncertainty and ambiguity and avoid cliché. And we want them to be, in Ben’s phrase,
‘athletic readers’—ready and willing to embrace long texts, reading past potential and actual
boredom. Many of these skills can be developed—rather paradoxically, perhaps—through
writing: specifically, by means of short creative exercises: the rewriting of part of a text from
a different point of view, or in a different genre, the addition of a scene or an embedded text
such as a letter, the transformation of poetry into prose or vice versa, and so on. This sort of
intervention, strongly advocated at the conference by Rob Pope (Oxford Brookes), is a good
way of sensitising students to many of the most important elements in literary texts. Creative
responses to literary texts need not be verbal—and at the conference Lesley Coote (Hull)
and Liesl King (York St. John) described an exciting range of creative works, including
music, short films, papier mâché, oil painting, digital art and dance. King reports that ‘in
many cases [students] have said that the opportunity to respond to literature using another
art form has encouraged them to look more deeply into the original text than they might have
done using the more traditional format. Again and again, students have said that they formed
a much closer emotional attachment to the text through their creative work.’
At the more technical end of reading, Greg Garrard (Bath Spa) spoke at the conference
about some software he is developing to teach the metrical analysis of poetry.
Understanding metrical construction and form requires stepping back from and looking much
more analytically at one’s first reading of a poem, and it is something that has in the past
been very difficult to teach students. ICT, however, allows sound and marked-up text to be
synchronised, making it much easier to explain and analyse stress patterns and line
structure. Garrard has designed a set of web-based tutorials that will allow students to test
themselves on their understanding of rhythm and metre. Lecturers will be able to use the
software to design assessment tasks.
B: Developing skills in gathering and understanding information about ideas/contexts
This is an underdeveloped area in English Studies. Because of the importance to the subject
of originality and creativity, assessment of students’ factual and conceptual knowledge about
texts, about history, about writers, about ideas—has tended to be taken for granted.
Separating out this sort of thing for independent assessment can dramatically help student
understanding. As Jan Jedrewski (Ulster) pointed out at the conference, ‘the essay offers
relatively little scope for testing [students] knowledge of material they may well have been
taught, but have chosen not to write about.’ A student with a very limited knowledge of
Victorian literature (knowledge of three writers, perhaps) may well receive a first, without
ever studying a raft of crucial authors and topics. Jedrewski’s solution was to prescribe a
compulsory fact-based questionnaire. Matthew Sauvage and Mick Jardine (Winchester)
demonstrated some online multiple-choice questions—not tests of factual knowledge like
Jedrewski’s compulsory questions, but complex and subtle assessments designed to
examine student knowledge of critical theory: students were required to fill the blanks in
complex conceptual diagrams and match up specially-written critical comments to schools of
literary theory rather than simply select (a), (b) or (c) as the answer to a basic question.
Clearly, approaches of this sort can be a powerful way of acquainting students with the
conceptual apparatus they are asked by lecturers to bring to their reading and writing.
C: Developing skills in structuring an argument
One obvious way to help students develop this skill is to get them to write essay plans and
similar small-scale texts with argumentative structures—not just once but repeatedly, to
acquaint them with the problems and opportunities that marshalling (or attempting to
marshal) information into arguments can present. Other forms of assessment can get the
students to examine the cut and thrust of seminar debate—writing up notes on seminar
discussion, for example. At the conference, Michelle Denby, Alan Girvin and Monika
Smialkowska from University Centre, Doncaster College, described a comprehensive set of
exercises designed to help with essay planning: the process of essay-writing is broken into
components such as ‘planning, research, critical reflection and evaluation and improvement’.
The components are assessed using forms such as short bits of text explaining the essay
question, plans of various stages of argument, annotated bibliographies, introductions,
conclusions and different types of paragraph: descriptive, polemical, analytical and so forth.
Students often need to learn that constructing arguments in English Studies is not a
straightforward process. Williams and Ellis stress the importance of ‘the willingness to
tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty in the weighing of evidence and the stating of
conclusions’. These and other complications can be addressed partly through various forms
of peer-review and peer-marking, of essay plans and of other similar texts. Online discussion
fora can be fertile sites for students to bat about, play with and develop their ideas about
texts and contexts.
Another important aptitude is the ability to take risks—to make imaginative connections, to
think outside the box. The extent of online resources is a help here, as archives such as
Early English Books Online can be the basis for exciting independent student work—either
as out-of-class projects or in-class exercises. Risk-taking can also be encouraged by using a
portfolio system of assessment, like Catherine Maxwell in her module on Late Victorian
Writing. On the first nine weeks of the course, students hand in short writing exercises,
receiving informal written feedback: at the end of the module, they must select four for
summative assessment. The same sort of formative opportunity for experimentation and
risk-taking can be created using peer-assessment, whether in the classroom, out of hours, or
online, as with Jess Moriarty’s use of blogs with Creative Writing students at Brighton
University. Blogging was used in order to provide students with a ‘safe’ environment in which
to give and receive feedback—less intimidating than the classroom.
Another way for students to explore the complexities of argumentation is through writing in
academic genres cognate with but different from the essay: Rachel Carroll from the
University of Teesside spoke at the conference about her experience of asking students on a
feminist theory and contemporary fiction module to write a ‘critical glossary’, explaining key
theoretical and generic terms. Doing this brought students face-to-face with the complex and
provisional nature of knowledge production. At Hull, Lesley Coote asks students to articulate
complex arguments about texts in a number of different, mainly visually-based, forms—for
example, posters and video games.
D: Developing skills in the process of writing
Writing skills can be developed by using many of the methods I’ve already mentioned:
creative writing exercises and other small-scale writing tasks, peer-review and assessment,
portfolios and so on. I’ve given writing skills a section of their own in this talk, however, to
stress the importance of the difference—for English, at any rate—between writing skills as
such and the crucial, but distinct skill of argument construction—sormething which need not
be textually-based at all.
Separating out these various skills, as I have done here, makes it possible to tailor specific
assessment tasks to the development of specific skills. The essay remains, however, an
assessment form capable of testing and developing all these skills simultaneously, as Morris
and Williams and Ellis point out. It seems likely that English lecturers will continue to want
their students to hone these skills within the holistic space afforded by the conventional
essay. What balance to strike between essay-writing and targeted, skills-based assessment
will be a major challenge to the discipline in the years ahead.
Summary
Context and Background
This paper considers current assessment practice in English Studies, using material taken
from a conference organised by the presenter together with colleagues at the AsKE CETL at
Northumbria University and held in December 2008. Though assessment is changing in
English, and many departments now include a wide range of innovative assessment
methods in their programmes, the essay remains dominant. In this paper, I examine the
reasons for that dominance and present a fresh rationale for assessment design in the
discipline.
Main Arguments
The paper argues that the past strengths of the essay—its openness and flexibility—are,
because of changing contexts in Higher Education, now its weaknesses: scaffolding that was
available in the past in the form of long-term, small-scale pastoral support must now be
provided in other ways. Problems bring opportunities, however: the skills traditionally
associated with essay-writing can be developed by means of small-scale, targeted
assessment tasks, devised by individual lecturers according to their own sense of what
aptitudes they would most like to foster in their students. In the second section of the paper, I
list four subject-specific capabilities that I believe all English lecturers would like to
encourage in their students: reading skills; skills in gathering information; skills in
constructing arguments; and writing skills. I discuss each of these of these capabilities
alongside descriptions of assessment methods showcased at the conference that I think are
particularly effective at developing that capability. Particularly important to the argument is
the distinction between skills in constructing arguments and writing skills. The construction of
arguments in English Studies is a complex process that is separable from writing skills per
se.
Conclusions
Because the essay simultaneously tests—and allows for the development of—all of the
various skills discussed in the paper, it is likely to remain an important element in the
assessment of English Studies. Balancing skills-based assessment with the holistic ‘gold
standard’ of the essay will be a major challenge for the discipline in years to come.