With these warnings in mind it’s essential to pin down two things: how many parts there are to the question and what weight you will need to give to each part. With many questions these structural problems can be solved by analysing the key concepts used in the question.
Indeed, in most, if you fail to do this, the examiners will deduct marks: they will expect to see you show that you can analyse difficult abstract concepts and allow this to influence, if not determine, the structure of the essay.
For example, markers for the University of London are told to award the highest marks (70 – 100 %) to those students who “note subtlety, complexity and possible disagreements, [which they].. will discuss”, while only average marks (40 – 60 %) are to be awarded to the student who adopts a “More relaxed application” of the question, and who “follows [an] obvious line.. [and] uncritically accepts the terms of the question”.
Similarly, in the Department of Sociology at the University of Harvard students are told:
Papers will be graded on the basis of the completeness and clarity of your analysis and the persuasiveness of your recommendations. As always, we will be appreciative of well-organised and well-written papers.
The same emphasis can be found at the University of Oxford, where examiners look for a good analytical ability, to distinguish first class and upper second class scripts from the rest. In the marking criteria it’s only in these two grades that any mention is made of analytical ability, with those failing to display it more likely to end up with lower seconds and below. A first class script should show:
analytical and argumentative power, a good command of facts, evidence or arguments relevant to the questions, and an ability to organise the answer with clarity, insight and sensitivity.
An upper second class script also displays these qualities, but ‘less consistently’ or ‘to a lesser degree’ than a first class script.
To give you an idea of what this means in terms of actual questions, listed below is a selection of essay questions from different departments at different universities around the world. You will see that the answer to each of them hinges upon the same ‘clarity, insight and sensitivity’ that we can bring to the analysis of the key concepts in the question.
Some of them, as you can see, incorporate the concept in an assertion or opinion, which is not always obvious. Others present it in a statement of incontrovertible fact, which you must analyse before you can evaluate it to see whether it s consistent with the facts or just subjective opinion.
Alternatively the concept could be presented in the form of a generalization. Indeed, this is, in fact, exactly what concepts are: they are universal classifications that we develop from our observation of individual instances of something. Concepts like “love”, “honour”, “beauty” are universal classifications of the certain emotions, acts and desires that we experience or see other experience.
So it is important to identify the opinion, the statement or generalization and let the examiners know that you have done so. In the following questions key concepts are underlined.
• Do the narrators of Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations speak with the same kind of irony?
(The English Novel, University of Harvard).
• Are there any good reasons for supposing that historical explanation is, in principle, different from scientific explanation?
(History, University of Kent at Canterbury).
• Did the years 16034 witness a crisis in the history of English Protestantism?
(History, University of Kent at Canterbury).
• Consider Duncan Kennedy’s claim that people who favour casting the law in the form of rules are individualists while people who favour the use of standards are altruists. Do you agree that the debate between rules and standards reflects that sort of deep difference in general moral outlook?
(Law, University of Cornell).
• Hobbes insists that covenants extorted by force oblige. (Sovereignty by acquisition is a good example.) Is his argument consistent with his theory? What problems does his insistence pose for his theory? In your answer, be sure to address Hobbes’s account of obligation, in particular the obligation to obey the sovereign.
(Philosophy, University of Harvard).
• ‘Authority amounts to no more than the possession of power.’ Discuss.
(Philosophy, University of Maryland).
• Is there any important sense in which all men are equal? If so, what is it?
(Politics, University of Maryland).
• Is democracy always compatible with individual freedom? (Politics, University of York).
• Are concepts of anomie and subculture still of value in the explanation of criminality?
(Sociology, University of Oxford).
As you can see, no matter what the subject, the analysis of the important concepts is the main focus when we come to interpret questions like these. They may be couched subtly in everyday language, like ‘unacceptable inequalities’, ‘oblige’, or ‘efficient levels’, or they may stand out like beacons warning the unwary not to ignore them, like ‘Paretian Optimum’, and ‘anomie and subculture’. Historians, for example, are fond of using concepts like ‘revolution’ and ‘crisis’: seemingly inoffensive and untroubling words. But then, look at the British Industrial Revolution and you find yourself wondering, was this a revolution or just accelerated evolution? Indeed, what is a revolution?
Is it all a question of the speed of change? In which case, the Industrial Revolution was more an evolution than a revolution, spread as it was over seventy to a hundred years. Or is it more to do with the scale of change? If this is the case, then there’s little doubt that it was a revolution, what with the mechanisation of labour, factory production, the growth of cities and the development of mechanized transport.
Much the same could be argued for a concept like ‘crisis’. Again it appears to be inoffensive and untroubling; that is until you ask yourself, what do we really mean by the word? It comes from the Greek, Krisis, meaning a decisive moment or turning point. So are we really justified in arguing that the years 1634 were not only a time of serious challenge to Protestantism, but also a decisive turning point in its history? Whatever your answer, you now have a structure emerging: on the one hand you can argue that it was a time of serious challenge to Protestantism, but on the other you might question whether it really was a genuine turning point in its history.
The same analysis of concepts and arguments can be found in just about every subject. In politics there are concepts like freedom, ideology, equality, authority, power, political obligation, influence, legitimacy, democracy and many more. Do we really harbour not a single fear of ambiguity when we use such a large and important concept like freedom, or was Donovan Leitch right when he admitted in the sixties that, ‘Freedom is a word I rarely use without thinking’? What do we mean by legitimacy and how does it differ from legality? And when we use the word ‘democracy’ do we mean direct or indirect democracy, representative or responsible, totalitarian or liberal, third world or communist?
In literature what do we mean by concepts like tragedy, comedy, irony, and satire? Indeed, it’s not unusual to find universities devoting complete courses to unravelling the implications of these and others like them: concepts like class, political obligation, punishment, revolution, authority and so on. In the following course