Speaker 1: I literally only did one thing to get a first class degree at university and I'm not sat here to tell you a bunch of generic, random and useless advice like 10 top study tips to help you get a first class degree, make sure you're working out and have a work life balance and eat healthy and make sure you have time for social time and here are 10 random study tips that are going to help you make better notes. No, I don't believe in any of that, I think that's a waste of your time so I'm going to cut to the chase and tell you how to actually work smarter and not harder and how I got a first class degree by literally just doing the bare minimum and also living my uni life to the fullest. I was always at the club, I was always at different social events, I spent minimal time studying and this is how I did it. In this video I'm going to be explaining the only skill, the one skill that you need that will actually increase your mark and that examiners will actually be looking for. Ready? Study the mark scheme, that is the skill and now we're going to be delving into what that actually means, what that looks like and how you're going to take that and turn it into a first class degree mark. Before I even thought about how I was going to answer the essay question or what my document was going to involve, I would always open two documents. I would split screen them so they were always side by side. The first document over here would just be the plan and the essay structure, the thing that I would look at the most during writing the essay and then this document over here is the actual essay itself which you're going to be submitting. Once you've opened up your planning document here, you're going to open up an internet tab here and get up your university mark scheme for this specific essay. I would always do a rough read through of the bottom few marks to see what exactly not to do but most importantly you want to be looking at that top band, everything it says in there and how you are going to achieve that. Planning is essential, it means you're not going to waffle, it means everything you write will be correct and will be useful in actually increasing your mark, right? So you're going to be writing a paragraph structure which you're going to be repeating throughout the body of your essay and within this paragraph structure, first you're going to be studying the mark scheme and incorporating all of those points into your paragraph structure so you don't even need to look at the mark scheme after this. Throughout the entire period of you writing this 3,000 word essay let's say, all you have to do is look at this little paragraph that you've written and make sure whatever answer you're writing up follows that structure and automatically you're hitting all of the mark scheme, you're writing an organised and coherent and clear, precise piece of work which is also always in the top band of every university mark scheme and mostly you are saving your own time. Okay so now let's get into the paragraph structure. So a typical PEEL paragraph structure you probably were taught in school but we're going to change it up a little bit and make it our own so it matches a first class degree criteria. So typically you would have point, evidence, explain, link back to question but our first class degree paragraph structure is going to be point, evidence, explain, critical analysis, another explanation and then link back to the question. Now let's go into how you're going to achieve each of these sections. Now you're going to have several paragraphs throughout the body of your essay that follows this structure and every single one will start with point. In order to achieve a cohesive and clear essay you have to make sure you're starting with point slash a topic sentence. So whatever you're going to argue in that next paragraph, the first sentence needs to highlight that. Step number two is evidence. Now we're going to go into a little bit more detail here and how you play this really determines what mark you're going to get. So for evidence if you're only using one to two quotes from one piece of academic work and you're referencing the author and all of your citations are correct and all of that, that is still not enough. For a first class degree mark you need to be synthesising sources and also be collating information from wide ranging academic sources. Your best friends in terms of collating academic research to reference in your evidence throughout your essay are going to be academic databases such as Mintel, Google Scholar will be your best friend to get academic journals. Do not use websites. The university website should actually have a webpage on all of their academic databases that they recommend. So whatever my point is, I'm now going to support that with evidence from a few sources. So for example, I might say the author X argues and then a quote or I might say from my evidence. However, in recent research it has been argued that blah, blah, blah, and then synthesise two authors from two different academic journals together, right? So if they have similar ideas, you can then put them in a synthesised reference, which is automatically going to bump up your mark. Once you synthesise a few authors and a few similar pieces of evidence from different academic databases that support the first point you've made, you're now going to go into explaining this in detail. The more depth and rich detail you can provide, the higher your mark will be. In this first explain part of the paragraph, it's crucial that you also bring in relevant theories from your course. This is where your lecture notes are going to come into play. Your critical analysis is where you're now going to bring in another piece of evidence which contradicts that first piece of evidence that you included in this specific paragraph. You're going to bring in research and evidence from other authors and other sources to argue against the evidence that you already included in your specific paragraph. And what this is going to do is allow you to talk about the limitations and gaps in the current knowledge out there. Your examiner is going to love it if each of your paragraphs includes you acknowledging the limitation and gaps in existing knowledge. So now that you're on the critical analysis section, you've brought in another piece of evidence to contrast against the first piece of evidence you've put in. You can now compare and contrast authors and kind of say where the limitations are, how they either support each other or contradict each other, and use this to develop your argument. The best hack to be able to achieve critical analysis straight away is by looking on academic phrase banks online. Now, I went to University of Leicester and they didn't have this, but University of Manchester has a free one that you can download on their website. And I use this for everything and all of my final essays and exams, even in my dissertation. And what it does is you're using phrases at the beginning of your sentence, which signals to the examiner, this is where I'm using critical analysis. This is where I'm now evaluating. All you have to do is Google academic phrase banks. So like you need Manchester, for example, or you should Google critical analysis phrases or critical analysis sentence starters. There are so many websites online. I probably used all of them. Okay. That will give you all of these sentence starters. And then whatever point you're making, just make sure your sentence structure kind of follows that just so it's extra clear to the examiner that you are hitting all of the requirements of the top band of the mark scheme. And one last little bit on critical analysis. It's really important that you include this. You're not falling into the trap of submitting a descriptive piece of work, which is very easy to fall into. I did this a couple of times during my first year, and then I was awarded a two, two mark. And then by my third year, I was only ever getting firsts. A descriptive essay might still sound really good and academic to you, but all it's really including is who said this? When did they say it? Who was affected? Whereas a critical piece of writing, which is what examiners are actually looking for for higher marks, will discuss why is it significant? How did it occur? Why did this happen? Why is the author making that argument? Why is that argument relevant? It's really about questioning and criticising the pieces of research you're using in your essay to make the best argument. So in the very top band of university essay mark schemes, they will always mention that they want you to have an advanced, nuanced, and thorough understanding of your essay's subject matter. And although that might sound hard, now that we're onto the final explanation part of all of the work you've already done in your paragraph, it's very easy now. You're going to tie in all of this information that you've just collated for the argument that you've made in this one paragraph. You've made your point, you've gotten evidence from multiple sources and put them together or contrasted them against each other. You've then explained it, then you put critical analysis where now you're questioning the significance and the relevance. You've already included so many various viewpoints. So now in this final explanation, you're going to show that you're aware of everything that's already out there, tying it all together and tying it in with your main point. And then finally linking it back to the question and making sure it applies to your essay. So as long as you do all of those things to a good standard and your subject knowledge is correct, you will get a first class. And I know that because I use this exact same structure. I did each of these steps and I would always get a first class. I also got a first class mark in my dissertation. So I wanted to teach you guys how to do the same. But before I go into that, I want to talk about one thing specifically in collating information from academic sources. That's a good little hack at making sure you achieve high marks. Now, I didn't do this in my general 3000 word essays for each of my uni modules, but I did this a lot in my dissertation because it's a bigger body of work. This was necessary. So this does link to dissertation. But if I could go back in time, I would have done this for my 3000 word essays as well. For my dissertation, I had an Excel spreadsheet open. And once I knew what my dissertation question was going to be, kind of what I wanted to write about in it, I immediately started researching because that's the first step of writing any dissertation. You need to look at all of the existing information out there, how that's going to support your argument and how that's going to form your whole 10,000 word essay. So in this Excel spreadsheet, I would have the author, the date it was written, the title of the academic paper, the arguments they made in it. So whenever I was writing my essay, I literally had a spreadsheet full of academic sources I could keep putting in rather than constantly having to Google. But what's really important in this pre-reading technique and in that spreadsheet of all of the academic articles you've pre-read, once you're pre-reading them and you're skimming them and you're kind of noting down, okay, this is who wrote it, this is when it was written, this is their main argument. Throughout that skimming process, make sure you're writing, what is the author's intention here? What is their intention to persuade the audience? And this is where you can kind of identify any biases, which you're then going to include in the gaps in the knowledge or the limitation section of your paragraph structure, which we mentioned before. You also want to know how effective was that argument and make a few little bullet points of that in your spreadsheet. And then lastly, you want to identify any limitations such as it was written a really, really long time ago, or it was a peer-reviewed article, so it's not that accurate, or it was written on a website that might have some bias. So now you have the spreadsheet of academic journal one, two, three, four, and then academic journal one, you've got the author, the date, the main argument, which you'll find in the abstract, the limitations of it, the intended message, any bias. And then when you're writing your essay and you need evidence and you need to back up with previous research, you literally already have it there and it cuts your workload and time in half. Okay, now let's talk about how you're going to get a first class mark in your dissertation. This was stressful, right? But it wasn't nearly as stressful as I thought it was going to be. I didn't cry once, and I've heard so many stories of people crying during the whole dissertation process. I also left mine very last minute. I did the whole 10,000 essay work within just over two months, I think, whereas most people started in September, October, and kept it consistent throughout. Of course, I do recommend that, but I'm just saying I left it until the very last minute. And when I was talking to my professor, she said, by far, I was the most organised on top of my work. And she always said that I was on track for a first class. So I always knew whatever I was doing, even though it was last minute, and it wasn't the smartest way to do it, it was correct. First and foremost, please, please take advantage of your dissertation supervisor. They are there for a reason, okay? I'm the kind of person, I like to do everything by myself. I don't like to ask anybody for help. I've never been one to ask my teachers questions or talk to the lecturer after the lecture, like, no. But a dissertation is hard work, and that supervisor is a pro at it. Take advantage of their knowledge. And just remember, you are paying for university one way or another, okay? Of course, you have a mark scheme outlined for your dissertation as well, how to hit that high mark. But your supervisor is going to know that mark scheme inside and out. Your supervisor is also an examiner for other people's dissertations. So they are like the ultimate mark scheme. That's why you need to soak up all of the knowledge that they have. Another thing that links to the mark scheme, and this is why I say this is literally the only skill you need to get a first class degree in uni because so many things link back to the mark scheme. When you're googling the mark scheme for your dissertation for your particular uni, your uni website will also have previous dissertations that have been marked by examiners or like examiner reports of dissertations. And they'll always include one that got a first class, one that got a 2.1, one that got a 2.2, and one that was a fail. I downloaded each of those and I reread and examined them myself over and over and over again. And I was looking at all of the examiner comments on each of these different dissertations with different mark bands. I was especially studying the difference between the examiner's marks on the 2.1 essay and the first class essay. I was looking at all the mistakes the person in the 2.1 dissertation made and all of the things that the first class person did right and then incorporating that into my strategy of writing my dissertation. I looked at those examiner reports daily, like all the time. I studied them inside and out and I could not recommend that enough because that is another form of mark scheme for you to study and incorporate into your dissertation and essay plan. Another form of mark scheme you can use, I went into my university library and I was not there a lot, okay? But I went and this was the first time in three years I actually went to where all the books are and checked out a book. For the first time in three years. And I actually recommend it. The thoughts of writing a dissertation sounded so scary and it's a very daunting task, okay? You're not really taught how to do it, they just say, now you have to write a dissertation, go and do it. So I went to my uni library and I found as many books, like textbooks on how to write a literature review, how to write the discussion part of a dissertation, how to conduct primary research, how to get a first class mark in your dissertation. There are so many textbooks that you'll find in your uni library that are titled just those things. I took all of them and I read them. It's like a form of a more detailed mark scheme. And that is essentially it. That is the one main skill that I used to get a first class in all of my essays, my dissertation, and finally get a first class degree certificate, which is the biggest achievement of this entire year. I really hope you guys enjoyed this video and you took something away from it. If you did, make sure you comment down below and thumbs up this video. Also feel free to DM me on Instagram. Let me know if this video helped you, because I would love to know and my DMs are always open. You can follow me on Instagram at Tam Corr. And I will see you guys in the next video because I make videos weekly. Bye.