Generally speaking, the further you progress through your education the more that coursework will play a big role in determining your overall grades. So, for example, although the amount of coursework an A Level student gets has been scaled back in the recent past, it still represents a step up from what you did at GCSE. And at university coursework plays a far bigger role, to the point where in some cases almost everything is assessed by coursework.

In some ways being assessed through coursework can be seen as a welcome relief. It requires a lot less cramming than preparing for exams, and there’s also less of that feeling of pressure that comes from knowing that regardless of all the work you’ve put into your subject over a period of several months your overall performance will be determined in the space of a couple of hours in an exam hall.

However, coursework brings its own challenges, and it’s sometimes the case that students actually struggle to make the transition from being assessed mainly by exams to being given more coursework. This is because if you haven’t done much coursework before, you may well not be fully aware of the expectations that are placed on you. Coursework isn’t marked in the same way that exams are, and because you get a long period of time to work on it the type of work that goes into it is very different from the revising and memorising you do for exams.

Rather than giving you general tips on the optimum way to approach coursework, it’s perhaps better to look at what students get wrong. If you’ve had coursework back recently and got a mark that was lower than what you helped for, one or more of these scenarios might apply to you.

Coursework mistake #1: Not considering the full implications of the task/question.

Generally speaking exam questions are more straightforward than coursework ones. This is because they have to be answerable in the space of a few hours. They also tend to follow a formula or pattern, so if you look at the past papers for your course you’ll soon get a clear idea of what problems you’ll have to tackle in your exam and how to deal with them.

Coursework assignments aren’t like this. They’re not designed for you to be able to think about the answer for just a few minutes before applying everything you’ve learnt beforehand. There will be specific ways of approaching the question that your teacher/lecturer will have in mind–for example areas of the subject you’ll need to discuss, or pieces of literature you’ll need to make reference to–but what these are won’t be clear immediately. If you don’t spend time thinking through the full implications of the question, and decide on an answer very soon after you’ve seen it, you’ll probably miss out some key things that the marker was expecting you to cover.

Coursework mistake #2: Not doing enough of your own research

Exams are about putting into practice a set body of work. Coursework involves much more in the way of exploring the subject on your own. This means, for example, that if the assignment you have to do is an essay, and all of the information and analysis that you use in answering your essay only comes from things you heard in your lectures or from the course’s compulsory reading, there will be a definite limit to the top grade you can get. Coursework is often about displaying additional knowledge and building on the information you’ve been spoon-fed, rather than simply repackaging it. This applies especially if the coursework you are doing is at university level. So if you’re preparing for your coursework by using the same technique you’d use for exams–that is, sticking to the essentials–you won’t be able to get the top grades.

Coursework mistake #3: Not matching your answer up with the course content

In some cases, however, some people actually make exactly the opposite mistake to the last one. After being confronted with a question that at first doesn’t seem to relate immediately to their lectures or classes, they produce a piece of work that doesn’t cover what they’ve studied in class at all. This is an equally big mistake, as it’s likely that your coursework has also been set so that you can show your proficiency in the fundamentals of the subject matter. It’s therefore important to both do extra research AND thoroughly go through your class notes when preparing your coursework.