The Complete Guide to Achieving a First in a Philosophy UG Essay.

Scoring highly on a philosophy module is, contrary to many people’s expectations, quite a difficult task.

Many of these students struggle to score higher than a 2:1 throughout their degree. Furthermore, it is very rare for Philosophy students to score higher than 80 at UK universities. If a student’s average is a 60, it will be very difficult to bring that average up to a 70 in their final year as they are unlikely to score higher than 75 in any of their modules. This isn’t to any fault of the average philosophy student. Philosophy students score amongst the highest when it comes to standardised tests like the GRE, LSAT, and IQ tests. This would indicate that philosophy students are amongst the most intelligent students. Perhaps it’s the case that philosophy students are lazy. Their grades might be stuck in the 60-69 range as they aren’t putting in the required effort. However, from my individual experiences as a student and private tutor, I don’t see this. Myself, my friends, and my students have struggled to score past 70% regardless of all their hard work.

In the second year of my degree I put an enormous amount of effort into my coursework. Because I worked so hard on these essays I expected to score high firsts in each of them. But to my dismay, nearly all the essays were returned to me with marks of 61-69. Even more troubling, my lower effort essays ended up with higher marks than my more ambitiously written essays. This left my average at a 67. As someone who held aspirations of a career in philosophy academia, I was disheartened. I had no idea where I was going wrong, and my essay feedback gave me little idea of what I needed to improve on. After considerable reflection in the summer between my second and third year, I reformulated my approach to writing an essay. I knew that this wouldn’t just be a matter of working harder but working smarter. In my third year I scored significantly higher in my philosophy essays. This brought my grade up to a first. I scored an average of 74 in my final year with essays reaching as high as 80.

Since finishing my degree, I have been tutoring students in degree level philosophy. Many of my students have made the same mistakes as myself, and I suspect many other philosophy students are too. The following blog post is a written version of this approach to writing essays. This blog post might not be for everyone. You might think that much of this is stating the obvious. But if much of this is common sense, there wouldn’t be so many students falling into the traps that I warn about here. Others might instead argue that this approach is overkill; that achieving a first in philosophy need not take all this effort. However, I am not arguing that this is the only way (or even the easiest way) to achieve a first in philosophy. This guide offers a way to minimise the risks that might lead you to not achieve a first. If you follow all the advice in this guide, you will be much more likely to attain a first.

It must also be recognised that this isn’t the ‘correct’ way to complete coursework. Many other students take entirely different approaches to writing essays and are successful in doing so. This is simply what has worked for me and my students. It is the advice I wish I could give to myself in my first year of my degree as it would have saved me a lot of time.

Section 1 – Prior Advice

This section will cover some general tips which will apply to the whole process of writing an essay.

• Decide

The process of writing essays requires making several key decisions. These decisions can be important. For instance, choosing an appropriate topic, or picking secondary literature to use in one’s essay. Whilst these decisions are important, students will often spend an inappropriate amount of time thinking them over. For example, whilst we are choosing an essay question, we can convince ourself that we are working on our essay. But if we spend any longer than a few hours making these kinds of decisions we are no longer working but procrastinating. This issue also extends to research. Students can tell themselves they are ‘researching’ for their essay whilst they are skimming over abstracts in the process of deciding which to use in their essay. But this kind of research doesn’t contribute to our final mark. Markers don’t assess our essays on how interesting the secondary literature we choose is. And neither are they interested in seeing that the student can refer to a wide array of papers if these don’t directly relate to your thesis. Whilst you might find it easier to write an essay on a topic that you find interesting, if you have spent days searching for interesting papers then I would suggest just biting the bullet and committing to one.

Oftentimes, we already intuitively know what question or topic we want to write our essay on but extend the decision making process to avoid doing the difficult work. If you genuinely can’t decide between two or more topics, then flip a coin. Otherwise, you’re just wasting time that you could spend writing a good essay. In my final year, I’d decide which question or topic I was going to choose at the very start of the term. This allowed me to work on my coursework for the entirety of the term, giving me much greater chances of performing well. If these questions aren’t available at the start of the term, email your lecturer and ask them for the list of questions or topics that you can base your essay on.

• Timetable

A crucial piece of advice I would give is to create a schedule, calendar, or timetable to allow you to track and chart your progress. Whilst I worked on my essays, I gave myself several deadlines to complete the different parts of the essay. I broke down the tasks required to meet these deadlines into subtasks and to assign these to my schedule. This allowed me to manage sizeable tasks without feeling overwhelmed as I knew I was making progress day by day.

I would highly recommend creating deadlines for the following tasks. Also, these percentages refer to the amount of time I’d recommend spending on each task (in relation to one another). You might want to change this somewhat, but the rewriting/evaluation should still be the priority.

-       Research/Planning – 40%      

o   Complete primary readings and – 20%

o   Secondary readings – 17.5%

o   Essay plan – 2.5%

-       Writing – 60%

o   First draft – 10%

o   Rewriting/Evaluation – 50%

• Focus

This is the most important of each of these tips. I highly advise dedicating as much of your focus and attention to your essay whilst you’re working on it. Avoid listening to music or checking social media whilst working. Aim to focus as much as possible on your essay for the whole workday. It’s easy when considering a difficult philosophical issue to let your imagination drift off. This is natural, but you should try and divert your attention as much as possible. The more time you spend focusing the more successful your essay will be.

Some people are confused when they score higher on last minute essays than essays that they’ve spent weeks on. I would argue that this is due to differences in attention. When you leave an essay to the last minute you will be dedicating all of your focus to it. Failure is a real possibility in your mind which will motivate you to stay on track. When we work on an essay for weeks we aren’t under so much pressure. Its then easy to write the essay and pay a fraction of the attention compared to what we would if we left it to the last minute. This isn’t entirely within our control, and this is a complex issue that I am certainly not an expert on. But as someone who has struggled with focus throughout my time at school/university, I can offer you suggestions based on what worked for me. In my case, I needed to motivate myself not only by visualising what I wanted to gain from performing well, but also by keeping in mind what would happen if I failed to achieve my goal. Each time that my mind would drift off, I would reflect on what I wanted to gain and avoid. This would help me to remain focused even whilst tired and unmotivated.

Over the next two sections I will outline my recommended process of creating an essay. The next section will discuss my research and planning strategy.

Section 2 - Research/Preparation

Philosophy modules will often have set required or primary reading(s) for each week’s topic. The readings set for your question/topic should be the focus of your essay. Secondary readings should only be used to understand or evaluate the primary readings in your essay. In other cases, some modules allow for more flexibility and will let you use non-required readings as the focus of your essay. As this isn’t the norm for UG coursework, some of the advice that I offer in this section won’t apply to these sorts of cases. However, I will consider these sorts of essays where I give examples of research I have done for coursework.

2.1- Primary Reading

Prior to investigating secondary literature or planning your essay you should go over the primary readings several times. Try and avoid approaching these primary readings with any preconceived notions of what the text is about or how you want to use it in your essay. Otherwise, you may ignore or pay less attention to parts of the text that don’t fit within your interpretation or contribute to your essay idea. This might prevent you from holding a nuanced understanding of the text.

Once you’ve read the primary text once or twice, I would highly recommend writing a summary of the text. In fact, I would recommend writing this summary without access to the text. By doing this, you will be forced to reconstruct the text together in your mind. After doing this, your understanding of the text will be deepened considerably. This will also help you to determine how well you understood the text. Perhaps you can write more than you expected; suggesting that you understood it better than you thought. Alternatively, you might have felt like you understood the text well – but when confronted with the task of expounding your understanding you realise you didn’t comprehend it as well as you thought. After you have done this, I would recommend doing this (or at least just rereading it) one more time.

2.2 - Secondary Readings

Once you have done this, you should consider what secondary literature you want to use in your essay. You might have a rough idea of what you find interesting about the text and have ideas about what you want to write. However, I would at least firstly recommend having a brief look at a guide on the issue to see what views scholars have presented on the topic. I would recommend looking for an Oxford Guide, Cambridge Companion or a SEP article related to the topic. Give this a quick look through and then choose one sub issue that appeals to you. When choosing papers related to this sub issue, pick one to three papers that can help you answer your question. I would highly recommend using papers which relate to one another or directly relate to an issue that you want to cover. Markers will not be impressed with a wide breadth of papers that you include in your bibliography unless you can cover them in depth. At this point, I would recommend reading these papers once or twice.

If you already have a strong idea of what you want to do and you cannot find this in the literature, you should speak to your lecturer to see if they have any advice/secondary reading on the topic. Alternatively, you can look up key words related to your idea on PhilPapers.  However, I would generally recommend basing your essay on a specific issue found in the secondary literature. The scholars you will encounter have already spent years (for some even decades) considering the issue that your paper is on. By centring your essay around their ideas, you are allowing them to do all the hard work for you. This is not to discourage you from attempting to be original. You can base your essay on secondary literature and still write an original essay by presenting an alternative idea that you think interprets or solves a problem within the primary literature with more success. Even just offering your own criticism of the secondary (or primary) literature could be original. What one shouldn’t do (as I learned the hard way) is to be overly ambitious. Trying to offer a radically unique view on a topic in just a single term is very risky. It’s highly likely that this is an idea already covered by academics on the topic, or even worse – an idea that they have considered but don’t believe is worth writing about. For these reasons, I would generally recommend basing your essay on a narrow topic within the (or related to) secondary literature.

Also, I would advise sticking to readings which can be directly used to answer your essay question. If your lecturer wants you to create your own essay question, create a question which relates both to the secondary and primary readings you have covered. I would suggest making this quite a narrow title/question which doesn’t require covering a large number of papers to answer.

2.3 - Essay Plan

After you have finished your secondary readings, you should begin work on your essay plan. A key mistake students often make is spending too much time working on this plan. This is potentially harmful for two reasons: Firstly, it takes away time that could be better spent on refining your essay writing. Secondly, if your essay plan is too detailed your essay might appear disjointed. When you write your first draft you will likely find that you want to expand on an argument more or realise that your understanding of said argument is weaker than you anticipated. This gives you two options: ignore the plan (or rewrite it) when writing your essay in which case you’ve wasted the time spent writing it. Alternatively, to stick to the plan rigidly and limit your argumentation or explication of the primary text. This means that your essay not only has less depth, but often means that the essay seems rigid or unclear. This is because you already have an idea as to how the essay should be structured before you’ve wrote it. This will confuse the reader who has no access to your essay plan.

I would advise spending no longer than a couple hours on the essay plan. Furthermore, not to follow it too closely in your first draft. When I write an essay plan, I try not to fill out the arguments you’re going to include in any real detail. Save this for the first draft. The kind of essay plan I create is just a basic structure/template of how I roughly want to approach writing the essay. Writing and refining your essay should take much more time than planning. To reiterate - your marker will not have access to your plan whilst they read your essay, so you shouldn’t write your essay with a plan in mind.

At this point, you might want to do one or two things before beginning your first draft. You might want to go back over your primary readings and find quotes, make sure that your plan makes sense of the primary readings, or even revisit the secondary readings. This can be useful, but once again, don’t spend too much time on this. You need to prioritise writing your essay.

One other thing I would advise at this point is to organise a meeting with your lecturer and to discuss: your plan, and your current understanding of the readings. This isn’t a requirement by any means but will act as a safety net in case your current plan/understanding is insufficient.

Section 3 - Writing/Evaluation

This is the most important part of your whole project. You should dedicate most of your time to writing, evaluating, and rewriting your essay. How you want to write your essay is entirely up to you. However, I do have some general advice that I will expand upon in a future blog post based on the most common mistakes I’ve seen students make whilst writing:

• Focus on evaluation: Whilst outlining the ideas of thinkers is a good way to demonstrate understanding in an essay, markers are still mostly concerned with your evaluation. You can even use evaluation to outline a thinker’s ideas. You can consider the strengths of different interpretations of said idea and argue in favour of one. In this case you would still be outlining the idea. But by being able to consider alternative views with respect to an idea you will demonstrate strong understanding. Of course, you can’t just evaluate the whole essay, but aim to evaluate more than outline.

• Structure: I prefer to format my essays with sections. This makes it easier for markers to understand what you’re attempting to achieve in each part of your essay.

• Signposting: Make sure to state at the start and end of each section what you’ve done, and what you’re going to do next (and how this will fit in with the broader aim of the essay). Once again, this will make your essay’s structure much clearer to your marker.

• Clarity: Don’t leave things open to interpretation for your marker; explain everything in as much detail as you can. Just because something seems obvious to you doesn’t mean it will to everyone else.

Section 3.1 – First Draft

Once you’ve created your essay plan you should aim to write the whole essay in one session. Don’t worry too much about making this well written at this point as you will have plenty of time to go back over it. Write as much as you can on the topic in a day or so. The reason for doing this in just one day is so that you have the whole essay clearly in your mind. If you spend one day on one section and another day on another, then you may no longer have the last section so clearly in your mind. If this is so, then when you start writing your next section it might seem disconnected from the previous section. This can make the essay seem less cohesive to markers. Writing your first draft in one go will also prevent you from procrastinating and will force you to pay a greater amount of attention to your essay. Don’t worry too much about refining your writing too much at this point. Try to just get all your ideas out.

Section 3.2 – Evaluation/Rewriting

At this point, you might want to revisit the primary and secondary literature to make sure your first draft accurately captures it. Once you have done this write detailed comments on the mistakes made throughout your essay. Consider each word, paragraph, and section and consider how each of these contributes towards establishing your essay’s thesis. Once you have detailed your mistakes, I would then rewrite the essay to address each of these issues. Then repeat the process: evaluate the essay again, and rewrite. I repeat this process at least five times before handing in the essay. This has been the most important part in scoring highly in my essays, as it has forced me to write clearly and succinctly.

Aside from this, there is a lot that can be said. I would recommend the following readings on this subject:

Conclusion

That covers the basic approach I would take to writing a philosophy essay. If you stick to this method, then I would be surprised if you didn’t get a first. But this is of course a lot of work to do. You can’t avoid the most difficult parts of this process, but you can significantly reduce the time spent here. To do this, you might want to contact your lecturer to advice (but be careful not to take up too much of their time as they are busy) or hire a private tutor.