Having a large team of writers who represent all of the major UK universities across a broad range of academic disciplines gives us a unique insight into the state of play across UK Higher Education. It’s a great resource to have available. So, from time to time we take full advantage to find out a bit more about what goes on in those establishments by surveying our teams of writers. We’re interested to find out any information that might have a bearing on the future products and services we could offer, and generally what we can do to help the current generation students with their university writing. The results are always interesting, and the most recent survey we ran was no different.
The best essay writing company in the UK
According to our writers, Oxbridge Essays is the best essay writing company in the UK. That’s what they said. Now, patently they’re a tad biased as they work for us, but a number of them also work for other essay companies so it’s not as though they’re uninformed.
They also felt that students who buy university essays from Oxbridge Essays have a significantly improved chance of achieving a 2:1 or higher in their final degree.
Our law writers felt that a student taking advantage of Oxbridge Essays’ service stands a better chance than other students of finding employment at London’s the most prestigious law firms.
This was all very welcome to hear, but it wasn’t primarily what we were asking them about!
Intrinsic problems in literacy
What we were primarily interested in was how today’s generation of students are shaping up with regard to their ability to think and to articulate those thoughts in writing. The bad news for UK education, in general, is that the same problems that have bedevilled us for the past few decades are still very much in evidence.
More than 50% of our writers who teach at leading UK universities have encountered students who are unable to identify an incomplete sentence, who don’t know the basic rules of grammar, and who have never received any guidance on how to structure a piece of prose. Over 60% said that they regularly encounter students who have never been taught techniques for how to answer an exam question. And more than 90% reported that their students have never been introduced to thinking techniques which would allow them to analyse, dissect or unpack a statement, hypothesis or argument.
As well as highlighting the same old failings in students attending university in the UK, our survey also revealed the way that universities are still failing to address these shortcomings.
Fewer than 5% of respondents who teach in university departments said that their departments provide any kind of guidance on academic writing. It’s not fair to tar all establishments with the same brush: there were some university departments who provided complete courses (10 weeks or more) in writing for first-year students. Sadly, those departments were very much in the minority.
Model Essays make model students
As our survey results make plain, there is still a strong imperative for Oxbridge Essays to continue to provide our essential services to students. Without our help and guidance with essays and dissertations, a large number of students at UK universities would not be able to achieve the grades that they are truly capable of.
Our model essays and the supporting analysis and materials we also provide are a toolkit that anyone can use to unlock the techniques required to take on a university course and be able to provide written work of the appropriate quality.
We see it time and time again: students who come through our doors unable to string their thoughts together can be transformed into writers perfectly able to turn in a well-argued, finely structured essay or dissertation. Put simply, our model essays can be the difference between an academic ‘no hoper’ and a model student.
