Reassessment toolkit: your guide to success

When resubmitting an assignment, your priority is to avoid making the same mistakes that led to your first assignment failing. As such, you should start by reading and understanding the feedback from that first assignment. Moreover, it won’t hurt to read through feedback you have received for other assignments, in order to pick up on any other mistakes you have made elsewhere that you can avoid this time round.

After reading the feedback for your previous attempt, you should then carefully read the brief for the resubmission. Bear in mind that you may not always be given the same question or brief for a resubmission. Read through the resubmission brief and highlight anything that’s different, then proceed as you would with any brief:

• Identify the main question, along with any instructions as to how to answer it, including learning outcomes that you are expected to fulfil within the assignment;
• If you have problem-based questions, work through the problems set, checking that the answers you obtain match with what you think they should be.

• Take note of anything that you don’t understand, and ask a tutor for clarification. You may feel unable to do this for a resubmission, but remember that your tutors want you to pass, so they will be happy you asked!

Once you have read through and understood the brief, you should start developing the structure of your resubmission. Having a good structure is essential for all forms of written work:

• Work out how many sections and paragraphs you will need to fulfil all the requirements outlined in the brief. As a rule of thumb, a paragraph in an academic essay is usually about 200 words. Use this figure to help you work out how many paragraphs you can fit into your essay, which in turn will help you work out how much content and detail you can include.
• Have a think about where you will fulfil which learning outcomes, or provide which kind of information based on what the brief is asking you to do.
• Look through your notes from classes to gauge what you already know about the assignment topic, and identify what aspects of the topic will be relevant to this assignment, and where you will address them in your resubmission.  Your lecture notes may contain similar problems and solutions that could be useful to you.

From here, you can use this overview as a guide for targeted, purposeful reading. As you find useful content, summarise it in in the relevant place in your assignment plan with a citation. Remember, though, to be a critical reader:

• Have questions in mind and look for sources that may provide answers.
• Don’t try to record everything the source says. Focus on the five items that are most significant to the source’s argument or most relevant to your own. Generally speaking, the more you try to include in your notes, the more you have to make sense of, and the less you will understand.
• In your notes, paraphrase useful content, rather than recording notes. Paraphrasing demonstrates understanding far better than quoting, and paraphrasing in your notes will kick start the process of developing your understanding of the material.
• Identify connections between sources: how do your sources work together to create an overall understanding of the subject? What does each source contribute to this understanding? Do any of your sources disagree with any others? Where do you stand within this disagreement? (note that you don’t always have to pick a side!)
• As you find useful material, make a note of it in the relevant part of your assignment plan, along with a citation. Over time, you will notice your plan growing. It will be messy at first, but resist the temptation to make it neat – even more so, to write it up into prose! Wait for the plan to be fully developed before you begin turning it into a first draft.

You’re ready to start writing up your first draft when your plan is evenly developed and you’re not making any significant changes to your ideas, what content you plan to include, or how to organise it all. At this stage, writing up your plan should take much less time than developing it, so long as you resist any temptation to change, add, reorganise, or remove content. Focus on turning bullet points into sentences, nothing more!

Structuring your paragraphs using PEIL is a helpful way of ensuring that you provide evidence to support your claims, but also that you follow up the evidence with an explanation of how it supports your claims. You may have come across PEIL in your previous studies, but to recap:

• P is for Point – a claim you are making in this paragraph (or Purpose – the topic or claim you will discuss);

• E is for Evidence – spend the first half of the paragraph presenting evidence to support your Point or to lead you to an informed judgement on the paragraph topic;

• I is for Interpretation – not E for Explain! You are still explaining how the evidence supports your point, but via more direct interpretation of the evidence.

• L is for Link – either to the next paragraph, or to the purpose of the assignment.

Watch our PEIL Paragraph video: