Essay questions should make students think, giving high fliers a chance to write something original and interesting. Questions should require analysis, not mere description. They should be as succinct as possible, but not so specific that they merely require students to regurgitate lecture material. University questions should be challenging, allowing a range of students to access the material. In particular, you don’t want to cater to the less-able students at the expense of boring the stronger ones.
I hate questions that are too narrowly tied to remembering what has been said in lectures. You will receive boring and similar responses. It is much better to offer a question that isn’t directly addressed, but which could be addressed with the material they’ve read. Something that makes them actually think and gives students a chance to put their own stamp on an answer.
Overly-specific and close-ended questions, such as these, are better suited to classroom quizzes:
• From 1998 to 2016, which industry spent the most on lobbying the federal government?
• What proportion of Roman emperors were assassinated?
• What is Daniel Dennett’s position on animal consciousness?
Simply recalling facts is a low-level skill. There is no need to give descriptive questions for essay tasks. Students will still recall and reference key facts in more open-ended and analytical essays, but their answers will be far more interesting.
Consider:
• When do interest groups subvert or damage democratic government?
• Why were so many Roman emperors assassinated?
• How do animals think?
Instead of asking students to recall specific readings, it is often better to provide a more general steer toward a certain body of scholarly literature. Students will still need to recall specific readings as part of their answers, but they will be able to bring in other readings and contrast them more freely. The result? A wider range of answers, rather than dozens of identical literature reviews, which will help to keep you awake during long hours of marking! For example:
• What is Skowronek’s theory of presidential leadership?
This question merely invites students to recall Skowronek’s theory. But consider an alternative:
• How do presidents make politics?
This question provides an obvious steer toward Skowronek’s work (he talks about presidents ‘making politics’), but gives students the freedom to bring in other presidency scholars too. They could choose to focus entirely on one scholar, or make the account comparative.
Your question might consist in a direct quotation from a specific author. For example:
“The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals.” (William James). Discuss.
“Federalism may have more to do with destroying freedom than with encouraging it.” (William Riker). Discuss.
“Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (Michel Foucault). Discuss.
These questions naturally require students to engage with a single author in great depth, but they allow students to contrast these authors’ positions with others. There is a big difference between a juicy quotation and a prescriptive, closed-ended question.
Sometimes colleagues construct two- or three-part questions, asking students to write an essay on several questions at once. For example:
• What is Socrates’ method for demonstrating that those with reputations for knowledge are actually ignorant and how does he use this method to draw conclusions about virtue and vice?
• What powers does the Constitution specifically provide for the president, and how have presidents over time worked to increase the power of the office?
• Which different conceptions of sovereignty exist and why are they important for International Relations?
These double or triple questions can sometimes work, but often they are a bad idea because they are too structured. They do too much thinking for the student. They are heavy-handed about signalling the tutor’s intentions, and they prevent students from organizing the material as they see fit.
At school, students will have encountered writing tasks helpfully split into separate sections: 5 marks for a definition, 10 marks for a basic pro-con argument, and 15 marks for an explanation task. This structured approach is fine for school pupils, but for university students it is a straitjacket. At this level, students should be given the freedom to write something more interesting.
Avoiding clunky two- or three-part questions helps signal your confidence in the students, and your belief that there are multiple pathways to brilliant essays.
There are many ways to write a top grade essay, not just one. Shortening these lengthy questions can also make them more elegant. For example:
• Is Socrates right to argue that the unexamined life is not worth living?
• Can presidential leadership be both expansive and constitutional?
• When should we circumscribe the sovereignty of modern states?
While question-setters should aim to be as succinct as possible, it is often helpful to introduce some interesting concept or hidden assumptions that the students can unpack. For example:
• Why has the US Congress become so dysfunctional?’ – requires students to think about what ‘dysfunctionality’ looks like and how to operationalise it.
• Does the state inhibit or enable personal freedom? – implies that these options are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, but are they?
• In what sense is David Hume a sceptic with regard to the existence of external bodies? – implies that there is at least some sense in which Hume is indeed a sceptic.
Instead of spelling out the assumptions (by introducing the words ‘or both’, or ‘if any’: eg: ‘Does the state inhibit or enable personal freedom, or both’; ‘In what sense, if any, is David Hume a sceptic with regard to the existence of external bodies?’), why not allow students to think about these questions for themselves? Reducing the amount of steering will increase the diversity of scripts you mark, and prompts students to think more carefully about the question itself.
In sum, essay questions should make students think, giving them a chance to write original and interesting analysis, rather than merely describe or recall lecture material. Keep them brief, but offer core concepts or a meaty quotation to give them something to unpack.
Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she writes and teaches on American politics, federalism, religion, and education. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. In 2020 she won the national Political Studies Association’s Sir Bernard Crick Prize for Outstanding Teaching and a Royal Holloway Excellence Teaching Award. Her Brilliant Essays website, YouTube channel and @Dr_Essays tweets help thousands of ambitious students to generate critical analysis, original thinking, and beautiful writing.
