Just over two years ago, I sat in a student staff committee, presenting a paper to my peers and professors.
I was proposing an “assignment library” – a collection of past student papers, spanning different grade boundaries, to show students what grade classifications actually look like, rather than an abstract marking criteria that meant I could never quite clear that 68 hurdle.
After speaking to my peers, I knew I wasn’t alone.
So I submitted my paper and, by the skin of my teeth, secured a trial for a compulsory first year module. A year later, I ran in the SU elections with a pledge to extend the model to all students. A year after that, I’ve gained endorsement from my university’s education committee to embed it into our new education strategy.
Here’s why other SUs should consider doing this too.
It’s hard enough out here
Starting university wasn’t easy for me. Coming from a working-class background and being the first in my family to pursue a degree, I wasn’t going to get help at home with referencing styles or formatting, let alone the case for taking on debt in the first place.
I started university in 2021, when the cost of living crisis was just becoming “life.” I dropped out of my first degree, a BA in Philosophy, to work full-time on the nightshift at Tesco instead – it felt a better use of my time.
I came back the following year to study English Literature, my real passion. But working full-time to support myself meant lectures and seminars were manageable, while drop-in hours and meetings with my personal tutor were not. Keeping a roof over my head came first.
So when I kept getting 68s, with the very occasional, inexplicable 72, I sacrificed some shifts to go to those drop-in sessions, where I was told the same thing over and over. The problem wasn’t my ideas, it was how I translated them to the page. And the only way to improve was to read journal articles.
Designed for who?
If I’m working 40 hours a week, I don’t have the privilege of reading through hundreds of journal articles, each 40–60 pages long, to build a mental library of reference for a 2,000-word assignment.
There’s also a more insidious problem. Being working-class and neurodivergent, I was expected to somehow absorb the styling and diction of an educational system built by people who thought nothing like I did.
And it’s not just students like me this fails. What about international students navigating the subtle intonations of English academic form in their second language? Students adapting to a completely new academic system? Or combined honours students juggling two or three different writing styles at once? The recommended way to learn all this was still to read examples at the highest level.
The natural solution was to let me learn from my peers instead.
I wasn’t going to work out why I was stuck at a 2:1 by reading a 42-page journal article from a published academic 20 years ago. I was going to learn from an undergraduate essay of comparable length to my own assignment, and from seeing what different grade boundaries actually look like. We learn from examples at every other stage of study – why does that stop at university?
Isn’t it cheating?
Whenever I’ve raised this idea with academic staff, one concern comes up immediately: give students a bank of assignments, and surely they’ll just feed it through AI and get a new essay out the other end.
This misunderstands why most students use AI. Wonkhe’s trained to stop learning report found the core drivers are time poverty, not understanding why they’re doing the assessment in the first place, and a lack of accountability moments in learning.
An assignment library speaks directly to the first two. And if a student wants to cheat by feeding an example through AI, nothing is stopping them from doing that already, with published academic journal articles as their source.
One academic I spoke to saw it differently.
She supported an assignment library precisely because example essays are something students always ask for, and if the school doesn’t provide them, students will turn to AI to generate examples instead: unregulated, never marked, never tested by a real person. An assignment library gives students the confidence to avoid that route, and reduces the pull toward looking outside their institution altogether.
Finding the right formula
This was never a problem with students not understanding their subject. On modules that assessed seminar contribution, my lowest score was 80. When I presented my dissertation at a conference, people asked to read the whole thing afterwards. The issue was never my ideas, it was how I presented them on the page.
Most assessment designs don’t test whether you know your content, they test whether you can present it in a way that satisfies the conditions of an old-fashioned system.
Some lecturers try to fix this by sharing first-class examples, but that’s inconsistent, dependent on individual goodwill, and only serves the highest achievers. Plenty of students come to university simply to get a degree, not a first, and that’s just as admirable a goal. Where’s the support for understanding the difference between a pass and a fail?
A range of examples across the grade boundaries gives every student the scaffolding to build their assessment literacy and the confidence to aim higher. A student who arrives expecting a third might leave with a first, because the format of the grade above hasn’t been gatekept from them.
An assignment library meets students where they are, whether independently, with peers, in seminar sessions, or in solo study, and gives them the confidence to succeed in an assessment format that too often holds them back from reaching their full potential.
