This is what I asked last year when I recorded my trepidation about marks, especially for final-semester students who were due to graduate. It seemed a huge responsibility, and still does.
This year I am ploughing through the first years’ work (“Early Years in the UK Context”) before I start on my second and third years’ assignments (“Young Children’s Spirituality” and “Becoming a Reader,” the “Independent Studies” in Early Childhood and Education), and feeling much the same. It may be a slog – a long list of students from one module – but each has to be given attention, each has to be read with interest. This year, however, it has an added sharpness. This is the first year that these marks “count” towards their final degree using a Brookes home-grown version of Grade Point Average. It feels very different from the diagnostic stuff of Level 4 in the past, not because I am pressured into giving different marks – that’s not an issue – but because I am more conscious than ever how far these students have to go in their writing and reading skills.
Consider this part of a paragraph (from a previous essay, now anonymised but not otherwise edited):
I have decided to focus on the two aspects of the curriculum the first being when children are supposed to start school and the second being assessment as I believe that these are two of the differences that I found interesting when comparing both curriculums. In some respects the two curriculums are quite similar however one of the most interesting differences is that English children start serious education at 5 and Welsh children start at 7. Denmark, Greece and Hungary and Finland. These places that start later focus on the children into the people they become.
No amount of in text comments such as “Not a sentence” or “What does ‘serious education’ mean?” will do much to support the long journey to fluency as a writer. What is needed is a revision of the expectations of school, and the expectations of tutors and students about the first year at University. I want to create more opportunities for this learning to take place, for assessment that genuinely supports students’ “learning journeys.” I want good writing to be a habit, when being caught out for failure of grammar is too often an occupational hazard.
No, it’s not a moan about “schools these days,” or a plea to go down the line that says that harder exams make better learning as in the current debate around calculators, but just a thought: at what point do we really get to teach children and young people how to write?
nicktomjoe 
So, your concerns are with the fluency of language and grammatical errors but what about factual accuracy (the Welsh school issue) and complete lack of definitional clarity and understanding of the term curriculum. I raise these issues not to be pedantic, although I appreciate this may well read as such, but to open the discussion to consider the function, purpose and underpinning theoretical basis for degree courses dedicated to the study of education.
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Thanks for this, Pamela. Yes, I didn’t go into it in this post, but there was, in a 2000 word report, both ample space to explore the issues you raise and I’m afraid (for less successful students) sufficient space for them to demonstrate a lack of engagement with theory. What perhaps I might have made clear was that I firmly believe the two elements (clear writing and critical argument) go hand-in-hand, and to some extent arise out of intelligent reading of relevant literature.
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