Racism, Gender and Class

LY 3018 Racism, Gender and Class - Steve Garner

Assessment guidelines

The following is a set of guidelines to help you with the assessment to be handed in BY 12.00 on Friday 20th January, 2012. There some rules, a breakdown of the marks, and some tips.

The rules apply to everyone

* First of all, everyone must have chosen a title from the list, or have agreed a different title with me. Failure to do so may well mean that you achieve a worse mark than you expect because you have chosen to go ahead without advice and guidance when it was offered.

* Work must be at least 1.5 spaced. I'd prefer double-spaced in font size 12. Spare a thought for my eyesight!

* Page numbers must be inserted.

* A word count must be made and stated on the cover sheet.

* A spell-check must be run. It is not acceptable to hand in work for marking if even you can't be bothered to check it. Some things do escape spell checks, but it is clear to me whether work has been checked or not. You will lose marks for handing in unchecked work.

* Poor referencing is not acceptable in your final year, and you will lose marks for it. The worst examples to avoid include; not providing page numbers for direct quotations*; not citing year of publication when referencing in the text of your essay; not including referenced work in the 'References'; presenting a 'References' list that is not in alphabetical order. (See referencing guide below, and separate sheet on Blackboard under 'Assignments').

* NB. The whole batch of essays will be run through turnitin - which is the plagiarism-detection software. If you are one of the tiny minority of students planning to cut and paste chunks of other people's material into your essay, and then pass it off as your own - think again. By the way, submitting your own essays that have already been submitted in other modules is also plagiarism. Even for those I don't spot straight away, turnitin presents a report detailing which online sources individual sentences come from. You risk having marks deducted, or even being given a '0' in this module.

Breakdown of marks (out of 100):

Argument / relevance of content 50

Spelling / language / presentation 15

Referencing 10

Range of reading evidenced 25

Tips

1 These are sociological essays. Whatever the theme, you must use the key references and theories in a given area. The less you do this, the more likely you are to get a lower mark because the point of sociology essays is to engage critically with existing scholarship. Please, please don't submit an essay that you could have written without going to university, and which takes the form of a series of unconnected general points drawn from your most recent conversations with friends, plus newspaper reading. That's not how to play the game.

2 Definitions: by now you should know that the key terms have to be defined, as this is a basic procedure in any essay. So where would you go to find definitions in a specialist sub-field of sociology? I'll tell you where not to go! Wikipedia, journalists, random bloggers, and non-specialist dictionaries. There is a now a corpus of sociologists' work on racism that even Methuselah would not have time to read, so you could