In my several years’ experience of supervising and grading dissertations and research projects, I have found that on average, it is the results and discussion chapter(s) (I have pluralised this because you can choose to combine the results and discussion into one chapter or you can keep it in two separate chapters) which gets the lowest marks. This is very frustrating for me to mark as often this chapter is worth the most marks and so students can really lose out, just
pay someone to do my discussion chapter!
The main reasons that students do not get top marks for the results and discussion chapter include:
• Work being rushed (click here for more on how to manage your time for a research project)
• Work is not planned properly (i.e. the literature does not naturally link to the actual research undertaken)
• Students don’t really understand what is expected here
• Students fail to analyse any data. Instead they simply state what is the response was for each question
• Students think that by writing a written summary of the results that are visually depicted is adequate ‘discussion’ (shock- it’s not!!)
