Assessment

The School of Social Sciences is committed to providing timely and appropriate feedback to you on your academic progress and achievement, thereby enabling you to reflect on your progress and plan your academic and skills development effectively.  You are reminded that feedback is necessarily responsive: only when a student has done a certain amount of work and approaches us with it at the appropriate fora is it possible for us to feed back on the student’s work.

The School adheres to the University's new policy on feedback, adopted in May 2010. In accordance with this policy:

• Feedback will normally be provided within 15 working days after the final submission deadline or exceptionally, and subject to prior approval by the faculty, within 20 working days
• An opportunity for formative feedback exists on all courses
• You can expect to be given clear information on the assessment process and on the grading criteria applied to each assessment
• Most written feedback on student coursework is now given via Turnitin. Please read the document 'A Student Guide to Downloading Feedback from Turnitin'. Please note that you will not be able to access your feedback online after the end of the academic year, so you should download and save it in case you want to refer to it later on.

We also draw your attention to the variety of generic forms of feedback  available to you on on all SOSS courses. These include: meeting the lecturer/tutor during their office hours; e-mailing questions to the lecturer/tutor; asking questions from the lecturer (before and after the lecture); presenting a question on the discussion board on Blackboard; and obtaining feedback from your peers during tutorials.

Feedback forms

The feedback forms have been designed to ensure consistency in the organization and quality of feedback, while recognizing that each discipline is a distinct intellectual enterprise with its own preferred conventions and criteria. The following are the standard templates for each discipline area:

• Politics 
• Politics (tutorial presentation)

The following documents highlight the marking criteria used in the School and specific subject areas.

• School Grade Descriptors

The School is able to award a number of prizes for excellent performance.  

Information is accurate at the time of going to press but may be subject to change during the year.

University's outstanding academic achievement award

The University will be awarding the top 0.5% of undergraduate students graduating this year with an award for Outstanding Academic Achievement. Any student on a Social Sciences programme with a final degree mark of 75% or above may be nominated.

The awards (presented in graduation ceremonies) consist of:

• A University of Manchester certificate
• A cheque for £1000

Dean's Award for Achievement

For those students nominated by Schools who satisfy the OAA criteria but are not one of the 13 students in the Faculty of Humanities allocated the OAA award, the Dean's Award for Achievement will be awarded.

The awards (presented in graduation ceremonies) consist of:

• A certificate

Resit essay questions

You can access essay resit information and questions through your course unit Blackboard site.

If you have any queries about your referrals (resits) please contact your Programme Administrator.