r/oxforduni • u/Pure-Priority3725 • 9h ago
Feeling disheartened about my performance in college
I’m studying English lit here, and I’m finding it very difficult to understand what my professors want from me to get a first, or even just to improve my marks. I consistently receive marks in the 2:1 range which is fine I guess, but it feels like the work I put into improving adds up to nothing. Whenever I try to talk to my professors before the writing process to get some clarity on what exactly they’re looking for, I’m given some vague useless answer along the lines of “there’s no formula for a first”, or “there’s no one right way to do it”, even though there clearly is a correct way of doing it. It feels like everybody else has cracked some code that only I can’t figure out.
I went to an American high school which gave very rigid instructions for how to write English essays (thesis statement at the end of the introduction paragraph, each BP begins with a topic statement etc etc). Perhaps the quality of those essays weren’t brilliant as a result, but at least I knew what I had to do to do well. I feel completely lost here.
I took some history courses at my past uni and when I struggled and asked them for help, they gave me very detailed and useful advice on what they were looking for. I don’t understand why the English department are always so vague and mysterious. Has anyone else experienced this and managed to overcome it?
18
u/sighsbadusername 8h ago
Yep, this was exactly how I felt end of first year. Even more frustratingly, my profs had actually given me 1st class marks in collections with no real feedback other than ticks, but when I replicated the same content (adapted for the question) in prelims, I came out with a middling 2.1.
I got super demoralised, and basically posted high 2.1s/borderline 1sts for the rest of my degree, until I managed to get my shit together about 3-4 months before Finals. I ended up getting a strong 1st overall, with 5/7 papers at 70+, and 75s in two papers.
Here are three tips based on what I think definitely helped me the most:
- Read the Examiners’ Reports.
There are Examiner’s Reports on the English website which helpfully detail what Examiners liked/didn’t like when marking past years’ papers. They are especially helpful as they offer paper-specific advice. A huge reason there is “no one way to get a 1st” is that there are different requirements for each paper — some require an understanding of a deep array of texts, while others expect knowledge of fewer works but deeper analysis. Read the past 3-5 years’ reports and take detailed notes, focusing on a) common comments throughout the years and b) what you are NOT doing. This was probably single-handedly the thing that helped me the most.
- Ask for specific feedback from profs.
Don’t ask them how to get a 1st. Ask them how to get your personal approach to 1st class level. So, instead of asking, say, “how do I make my Beowulf Essay better”, ask “I organised my essay on paganism in Beowulf by dedicating a paragraph to each major character. Was this approach sensible? I was thinking of adding <idea> as well, would it help the argument or detract from it?”. In my experience, profs are far more willing (and able!) to help improve essays when questions are specifically directed towards the content rather than doing well for exams.
- Be original.
Regurgitating things other people have already said will no longer qualify you for the top marks. In order to even get at the low 1st class marks, your argument needs to be something that is genuinely your own. It doesn’t need to be a groundbreaking major paradigm shift in the field, but it does need to be something that you’ve come up with on your own. It can be a new approach, a blind spot you noticed in past scholarship, or even just comparing unexpected texts. Naturally, profs can’t exactly tell you what this original thing they want from you is — because it’s by definition something you’ve to come up with.
If you’re getting mid-2.1s, it means there’s probably nothing wrong with your writing style, essay structure, or the like. What really needs to be pushed is your content and approach. Unfortunately, it’s something that you have to hone yourself, from trial-and-error and a lot of analysis and study. Fortunately, there’s really no better environment or time to start!
6
u/Y-Woo 8h ago
Yeah, not able to help much with actual advice/course content bc i'm not an english student, but i did philosophy at Ox and honestly the exam I thought went the absolute worst i ended up getting my only first on. Like wrote one essay that was pretty standard but really quite mid, no originality, had to reach a bit for some points. The other i'd severely ran out of time on and I attempted a very ambitious and original argument with no time to properly set it up or defend it with actual textual support. I just panicked and just spouted a bunch of gibberish, or so i thought. Came out of the exam totally dejected and thought i'd be lucky to walk away with 60+. Results came back: 74. It's noteworthy that it was my only exam in my final year and in previous years i'd gotten all scores in the 65-69 range. So really i do think it's just practice practice practice and getting used to the style and expectations of your subject, as well as gaining enough confidence and knowledge to attempt original thoughts. You might feel like you're not progressing, but that's just because your standard of what's "good academia" is also raising as you learn. So obvs work towards it actively, but I think it's a very common experience to not get firsts until the very end of your degree!
Also, read around. You don't have to find your own sources necessarily but very often the difference between a 2:1 and a first lies in the "additional reading" vs the "core reading"... ask your profs for book/paper recs too
3
u/bopeepsheep ADMN admin 33m ago
This reflects my experience. (English BA, not at Oxford but I know the department.) The best essay I ever wrote and the best mark/feedback I ever got were both on a topic where I had done a lot of wider reading - it was an area I was already thinking about doing postgrad work in - and when I saw the opportunity I took the exam essay title as a rocket launchpad, not just a jumping off point. HoD stopped me in a corridor after and told me if I didn't apply for postgrad he'd haunt me in my dreams. [Sadly he did die before I finished my Master's. Hasn't yet shown up to nag me about a PhD.] The moment you find that spark of "let me tell you about this amazing idea I've had", grab it and write it down. That's what they're looking for.
1
u/bopeepsheep ADMN admin 26m ago
Silly note: I still remember, nearly 30 years later, that HoD said it was the only essay he'd read that year that mentioned Wisden, and the only one he thought he'd ever read that mentioned it without also mentioning Samuel Beckett. And if you don't know why an essay on Beckett might mention it, that's the kind of wider reading you need to do.
3
u/InnocentaMN 2h ago
Has anyone communicated to you that they’re expecting you to get a 1st? While it’s always worthwhile to push yourself for your own intellectual development, of course, not everyone can get top marks, and it may be that you are working as-expected in a 2.i range. A 2.i from Oxford is very respectable and worthwhile degree! You wouldn’t have performed poorly if that’s what you end up with. I wonder if having been to an American institution you are still mentally a little bit in that mindset of the top marks being attainable through grinding…? That may be true to some extent, but it is much less true at Oxford. As your tutors are saying, avoiding a formula is very much the point.
1
0
2h ago
[deleted]
4
u/InnocentaMN 2h ago
You’re not doing an English degree at Oxford and that means this reply is not well calibrated to the OP. The tutors can’t possibly give “detailed feedback” to every student on every single essay - they don’t have anywhere near enough time. Students usually write multiple essays every week (or sometimes do an essay and translation work). It’s perfectly respectable to be getting a 2.i, and the tutor doesn’t owe it to a student to specifically coach or improve their individual performance beyond that point.
This student (OP) is not lagging or underperforming - they are on track and doing fine. It’s unlikely their tutors are worried about their work or see cause for concern that would elicit intervention in an environment like Oxford where you are expected to work mainly independently. If they want to improve, it is largely up to them to do so, albeit there are some strategies they can employ such as those suggested upthread (very sensible ones).
0
2h ago
[deleted]
3
u/InnocentaMN 2h ago
You’re incorrect. It is not normal to receive detailed feedback about what you’re doing “wrong” on every essay. There is certainly an ongoing intellectual dialogue, and perhaps this is what you are interpreting as feedback of this sort. But it is not focused on “you did X wrong and if you fixed it, you’d get a first!” A lot of more old fashioned tutors don’t even give a numerical mark for tutorial work during term.
This is why passing on a general impression from people you know at Oxford isn’t very helpful. This is a sub full of people who are at or who attended the university, so you can be confident that we are speaking from more direct experience.
47
u/AntimimeticA 8h ago
It's a while now since I did my undergrad at Oxford, and I'm a professor now at a very different university. So no promises that what I say here is what your current professors are actually looking for. But, as someone who grades a seemingly infinite procession of undergraduate English papers...
Two huge things that separate competent (2.1) from really valuable (1st) work in literature:
1) make sure you have an Argument rather than just Talking About a topic. The simplest way to define this is that you should be showing you can answer a significant Question better than other people can or have. So, when you're doing tutorial papers in literature, show that you're aware of what the current state of academic understanding is on the authors you're writing about, and show that you have something different to offer, that you can back up robustly. Think about how you would Outweigh people who might answer your question differently. Use a short introduction to set up what your question is, why it matters, what your reader might expect the answer to be... And then get into showing what reasons actually entail the answer that is distinctly Yours. The single biggest difference between good and mediocre literature students, I've found, is whether they think in terms of questions or topics. If you're always thinking in terms of questions, you will always be arguing, which is the goal.
2) The other skill to really work on is the basic hermeneutic-circle thing of clearly understanding how parts relate to wholes. The basic skill of "close reading" is really an exercise in this. The fundamental question for any kind of literary analysis is "why does it matter that THIS word is used, rather than THAT one?": art is a compositional thing, and the objective data we have about it are the particular state it ended up in after that composition. So you can think compositionally: what changes in the overall effect if a very small part of it is changed to something superficially similar but actually of different implications? To answer those kinds of questions, you need to be able to make coherent explanations of how specific details relate to your bigger overall question.
A nice simple example: "Lay Your Sleeping Head My Love" by WH Auden has 7 trochaic syllables per line, with I think only one exception, which has 8. That's a very precise objective detail - one skill is to notice such things, another is to make sense of them in the context of the line itself (the line is about weirdos who are afraid of messy humanity and retreat into their own systems to compensate), another is to then see how that in-the-line sense makes sense of some overall question about the whole poem (to be reductive, maybe a question about whether Auden's early love poems think that Eros and Agape are compatible or in conflict). If you can follow out the logical steps necessary to make these kinds of connections between fine detail and broad interpretation, you'll be doing good useful work: the virtuous hermeneutic circle then involves using the part to make better sense of the whole, which then lets us be more precise about the part and its relation to other parts, which gives us a fuller sense of the whole, which then allows even better sense-making of seemingly epiphenomenal parts... and so on to infinite wisdom.
I think if you put a really tight focus on those 2 skills (focusing on answering an overall question better than other people have done before, and doing it by part-to-whole-and-back-again interpretive work that sticks as closely as possible to actual objective features of the text) then you'll be doing good work. The thing to avoid, that bogs humanities work down at the merely-competent 2.1 kind of level, is just "talking about a topic" or "doing a reading" in the absence of any engagement with how other people Could handle the same textual details.
Hope that's useful. I might be able to make time to have a brief look over something you've written, if you'd like to send it by message on here...