Formative coursework forms an important part of the assessments for your course. Each course has a set number of formative assessments that the students can attempt. It is an important element in your academic year to understand where you stand as a student in terms of your grasping of concepts, your writing style and your ability to produce a coherent argument. While your grades won’t count towards your final mark, I would still highly recommend that you submit them to better understand how to improve.

If you’re a student who is not familiar with the academic style of writing and the quality of work that is expected of students at LSE, the formative coursework is an amazing opportunity to learn it. Personally, as someone who hadn’t written academic style essays before the feedback on my formative coursework was very important for me to understand how I can better frame my thoughts and arguments.

Through my formative coursework feedback, I also understood how to support my arguments with literature, something that I struggled to do in my first formative essay. It showed me how to analyze the text and relate it to arguments in favor or against it.

When you get the feedback for your first formative coursework take the time to sit and understand where those points apply. Seeing the mistakes and scope for improvement in your essay helps you to understand the feedback better. I would also encourage you to discuss it further with your professor, if any of the feedback is unclear to you.

Most importantly, you should keep the feedback in mind when you’re writing your next formative assessment. You only get a few formative assignments a term and making the same mistakes in all your assignments doesn’t leave a lot of scope for improvement for your essays later. If needed, write down the feedback in bullet points and keep them as reference when you’re trying to write your next assignment.

An important tip that I would share with all new students is to make use of the resources available at LSE LIFE. There are various sessions on how to write a good academic essay, how to use your readings effectively, how to cite your references correctly, etc. All these sessions can help you to improve on the coursework you produce and by the time you write your summative assignments you’ll have a better understanding of what is expected of you and how you can deliver on it.