Applying Scalability to Meet Word Count Requirements in Written Assessments

Abstract

Using the concept “scalability,” the authors examine the difficulties university students face meeting word count requirements in assessments and explore the approaches students use to address this challenge. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with students on a Business Management degree at a UK university. It was found that students gain experience of producing large word count assignments in a variety of ways, but miss opportunities to benefit from scalability to increase output more efficiently. Indicators of where teaching staff might support students more fully emerge from the study. This study provides an original focus by considering scalability as an approach adopted by students to meet word count requirements in university written assignments. It is anticipated that the findings will delineate an issue that staff had not considered before and develop practices that will improve students’ performance in written assessments.

Keywords:

• Scalability
• university assessments
• word count

Introduction

While the requirement for critical thinking and evaluative writing skills (Crème and Lea 2008) that underpin assessments have been examined in academic literature, students’ ability to scale-up the quantity of writing to meet the demands of large word count assessments has been under-scrutinized. However, as Pike and Harrison (2011) found, final-year undergraduate-level students felt insufficiently supported and less able to carry out large assessments. This defficiency could be particularly applicable for those students without previous experience of large assessments, such as those from academic traditions or who took pre-university subjects that emphasize examinations rather than course work. These students will lack, or have little, prior experience of large assessments to draw upon. This study, therefore, asks “To what extent are undergraduate students able to draw on their previous experience, in order to be able to ‘scale-up’ their writing output to meet large word-count assessments at university?”

What is meant by large word-count assessment?

In the UK, The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) does not specify word counts for assessments, leaving it to the individual institutions to decide (QAA 2015). In addition, they note that the word length required for a piece of assessment varies depending on the type of assessment activity, the level of the qualification, the credit rating, and also the custom and practice of the subject. As a consequence, there is no higher-education definition of what constitutes a large word count.

Academic Marker (2024), an online academic support platform, highlights six different types of essay size, with extended essays comprising 1500-, 3000- or 5000-word requirements, and dissertations of 10,000 to 15,000 words. Consequently, a large word count is deemed to be 3000+ words, to reconcile to the higher level of an extended essay classification.

Scalability

While Carless et al. (2017) refer to “scaling up” in assessments as an approach to examining the implementation strategies of particular pedagogies, here, the economic concept of scalability is an applied analogy that potentially provides insight into how students might manage increasing word-count assessments. Langlois (1999) economic model of knowledge assumed that one of modernity’s effects is that tacit, situated knowledge, is codified into abstract, systematic knowledge that is transferrable into different areas (educationally described as “High Road Transfer” (Moore 2017, 2). This knowledge can be crystalized into machines and organizational processes that could replace the need for situated, tacit knowledge, or into knowledge that can be formally taught, learnt, and accredited. In a business context, Langlois (1999) analyzed software companies and noted that economies of scale were derived from reusable pieces of knowledge that arise from “this process of learning about production as production increases” (14). Scalability is, therefore, a process by which businesses can adapt to meet increased demands on its resources to meet growth in customers or production without a corresponding increase in resources (Thiemann 2022).

Scalability is underpinned by the re-application of knowledge, which allows an individual to ramp-up production based on previous learning and thereby benefit from a greater-than-proportional increase in output. Hence the concept “scalability” can be applied to writing large word-count assessments. Here, the same knowledge is re-applied to increase the volume of words produced. Using an economic model then, students require tacit knowledge about academic skills, including time management, to craft bespoke pieces of work, like essays or reports, in non-standardized situations. Standardized assessments reduce the need for tacit knowledge, which can be difficult to transfer across assessments without enough practice that the skills become automatic (low road transfer—Moore 2017, 2).

By applying the “reuse of knowledge” to an educational context, scalability would, therefore, be dependent upon students’ ability to transfer cumulated knowledge in understanding and organizing assessments, so that they can apply it effectively to larger pieces of work. This is related to the concept of the “experience curve.” The experience curve was originally applied in industrial contexts to determine how costs would proportionately reduce as cumulated output doubles (Lloyd 1979). It has subsequently been applied in non-industrial contexts, such as healthcare education (Pusic et al. 2015), in order to relate learning effort and achievement, The experience curve is, therefore, potentially transferable to an educational setting, where students might reduce effort in subsequent pieces of assessment based on their experience of doing similar pieces of work.

In addition, Langlois (1999) found that increases in labor led to a greater-than-proportional increase in output if there were a change in knowledge, underpinned by being better organized to cope more effectively with the increase in labor effort. Considering this in an educational context raises the question of to how well organized students are in terms of time and management of learning resources. Moreover, “economies of scope” are derived from sharing a body of knowledge over different but complementary products. For students on a degree, this could involve using learning and learning materials across similar modules or topics, or through connecting with fellow students to share information relevant to an assessment.

Scaffolding by academic staff reduces the cost of learning to students by supplying tacit knowledge, or machinery such as pro-forma, to replace the need for it: economic theory suggests that if the costs are reduced far enough and consistently enough then the students will have no incentive to work collectively or learn how to reuse knowledge about assessments. Where staff are entirely responsible for their own modules and the outcomes, none are incentivized to risk “fading” (Taber 2018) the scaffolding they provide, nor include scaffolding for later, vertical transfer (Melzer 2014) into other lecturer’s modules. A scalability approach differs from more standard psychological approaches, in which students use lenses such as procrastination (Steel and König 2006) and the planning fallacy (Kahneman 2011), first, to understand their time management issues, and second, to apply their understanding. For example, Steel and König (2006) show how breaking up large unpleasant tasks into smaller, less unappealing tasks and pacing yourself may mean that more work is done overall. However, in situations with tight deadlines, and where the student has unavoidable calls on their time (such as paid work, see Callender 2008), this approach could be incorrect. It is therefore argued in this study, that a scalability approach allows students to choose which time management method is a useful tool for them as it provides a broader framework into which they can fit lower-level time-management tools. Scalability also differs from those EFL interventions that improve writing speed, fluency, and vocabulary through the tacit process of direct practice (e.g. Nikodemski 2022). Instead, it is a metacognitive, organizational intervention. One issue with providing scaffolding for students to understand scalability is that scalibility is not made explicit within time management. The words and concepts that people understand influence behavior, as they can allow discrimination between similar concepts, colors for example, and enhance memory for concepts that people can name (Eysenck and Keane 2020). Scalability is not a commonly used part of time management. For example, it is not necessarily covered in time management assessment scales such as the TMBS (Macan et al. 1990), TMQ (Britton and Tesser 1991) or TSQ (Bond and Feather 1988). These may ask respondents if they increase task efficiency or review goals but they do not ask if respondents compare different tasks when planning, nor if the size of the task affects how they approach it. Scalability can be understood as a threshold concept (Meyer and Land 2005); difficult to understand until it is made clear, transformative and impossible to unlearn once understood. It is an integrative concept in that it links together individuals’ experiences with those at company and organization level. As scalability is normally not made explicit, students’ understanding of how to scale up work remain “alternative understandings of threshold concepts” (Land et al. 2005, 61), containing intuitive errors that actively hinder more effective time management.

Focus of this paper

This study provides an original focus by examining approaches through a scalability lens, that students adopt when meeting word count requirements in written assessments at university. In particular, to what extent do students apply the elements of scalability, specifically reusing knowledge and use of resources, to meet large word-count requirements in assessments?

Study aims and objectives

This research aims to examine the extent to which students apply scalability in coping with writing large-scale pieces of coursework. The objectives are to:

• examine the difficulties students face in meeting word count requirements in assessments;

• explore the approaches students use in meeting word-count requirements in assessments, in particular whether scalability is applied;and

• discuss the practical implications of the findings for university teaching.

Research approach

Since approaches in addressing assessment word-count requirements might be individualized, it was felt that an interview-based approach (Gray 2014) would yield greater insight than a survey-based one. The research participants for this stage were second and final-year BSc (Hons) Business Management students in a UK university, who were engaged in a three-year, full-time degree program. There is no “first-year composition course” for these students. Later-stage students (Years 2 and 3) were chosen, as it was felt they had more experience of university assessments and coursework than first-year students and therefore could look back and reflect on their first-year experiences. Business Management students at the participating institution were selected for several reasons. Firstly, business management degrees comprise a broad number of independent disciplines that demand different skills and are assessed differently (QAA 2023). For example, accounting involves generating and analyzing numerical data, while marketing involves evaluating processes of customer behavior. This means students will be exposed to a broad range of assessment methods. Secondly, the authors are located in the business department and therefore have more ready access to business students. It could, however, be considered convenience sampling. Nonetheless, it was felt that more meaningful interpretation of responses was possible, due to researchers being more aligned and empathetic to the students.

Ethical approval was granted by the University as a mandatory requirement for academic research using human participants. An e-mail requesting participation was issued to 160 students, and 10 positive responses to participate were received. Semi-structured interviews were held by the researchers (see table 1), not only to provide consistency of questioning across all participants but also to facilitate individuals having an opportunity to respond further on persoanl approaches and provide deeper insight. The interview was based around eight questions (see Appendix 1). The questions were derived from applying the scalability concept to an educational scenario, especially how reuse of knowledge of previous experience was used, and how use was made of learning and human resources (rather than machines). The questions, therefore, explored students’ experiences of completing coursework on the degree program, challenges and approaches in meeting word-count requirements, and the use of resources to support the task. Consequently, the interview questions reflected the themes derived from the scalability literature but applied to an educational context, with direct questions (Paley 2017) asked on these themes. The interviews were subsequently written up, analyzed, and commonality within the responses noted. The commonality was then examined across the questions to derive themes (Braun and Clarke 2006). The findings are presented in the themes of: prior experience; getting a bridge; freedom and time; usse of available resources; and improvements.

Findings and discussion

Prior experience

There was a clear distinction between prior experiences of assessments in school and university. Students who had completed school-/college-level assessments at UK Key Stage 5 (12th Grade Senior in US) reported an emphasis on supporting students through an examination-based assessment regime.

There seemed to be a more emphasis on revision technique than writing technique. (P.1)

That guidance extended to guiding students through the school-based assessments in a structured and deliberate manner, which seemingly negated the need for achieving word counts

As long as it hits what’s needed, word count is not so critical

Nonetheless, participants felt this was dependent upon the type of qualification they studied, since assessments varied with the subject. For example, English required more written content than mathematics or design technology. However, exam-based assessments at school will potentially reduce students’ opportunities to gain skills in lengthy writing and therefore reduce their ability to reuse those skills to gain scalability benefits when at university.

It was interesting that one second-year student (P.3) felt he had useful experience of assignment writing, as he had undertaken UK Key Stage 5 duringCovid-19 lockdowns, and therefore the assessment was based on coursework rather than examinations.

Three students had completed a BTEC (a UK work-related qualification—see: https://qualifications.pearson.com/en/about-us/qualification-brands/btec.html) alongside their academic qualifications. Since assessments were based on coursework, they found it a useful grounding in writing long pieces.

My first taste of coursework on my BTEC was 1000 words, which seemed a lot at the time, but it helped me at university in terms of size of work. (P.5)

The participant’s comments that previous experience of coursework was useful at university, suggests an element of reusing knowledge, which is fundamental to Langlois’s concept. In addition, it gives the student a starting point on the experience curve to potentially accelerate learning economies of scale.

Getting a bridge

Students who had undertaken a BTEC qualification at school, found that this seemed to form a conduit or bridge, from school to university, in terms of coping with written work. The jump from 1000 words at BTEC to a 2000-word piece at university was made more doable.

Two of the students had completed the foundation year at university before moving onto the 3-year degree. This was seen as invaluable:

What helped me was I did a foundation year. It helped me structure work, what markers are looking for. I wouldn’t have coped otherwise. (P.6).

Similarly, another student had partly completed a year at a different university, on a different subject, and said this provided vital insight into work demands on the final degree choice.

Nonetheless, the skills learned at the foundation stage can also be an anchor thatholds students back. For example, one student (P.10) used the same technique for managing her time as she had been taught in the foundation year and simply worked much longer hours to cope with longer assessments on the degree programme,. Being organized was one of the underpinning aspects of scalability, and here, the student citing better time management suggests this is being applied.

Freedom and time

Students tended to like the freedom that university assessments gave them, compared to the more restrictive assessments at school. Consequently, the more room an assessment left for personal expression, the more it was positively approached:

The more vague the assessment, then the more choice you have, which allows you to write more. The narrower the assessment, the more restricted you are. (P.2).

I like tweaking stuff and thinking about it, so having a question in advance reduces stress. You can do a bit, come back to it and be more creative. (P.5)

It appears that having more time to engage with a large word-count assessment offered flexibility and allowed more opportunity to expand the word count. Some participants used the time to develop a more structured and pragmatic approach, establishing a framework:

“I break down the assessment and work through each part. I put a general word count target for each section” “I list the relevant topics for each section, and then build up this, slotting in any new points” (P.8).

Breaking down the assessment task into smaller segments perhaps facilitates easier application of previously learned knowledge, rather than looking at the bigger overall picture. However, using the Steel and König (2006) TMT model of behavior suggests that these creative pieces are machines for producing procrastination: large, at the edge of efficacy and with far deadlines. None of the students reported that they had been specifically taught time management for these assignments.

Use of available resources

The effective use of available resources is a key part of scalability. Here, a key resource for students will be library materials. Six of the participants stated that Google Scholar was their first point of call as a general learning resource to be accessed when researching for assessments. One student felt that the university’s database was not as convenient as Google Scholar, while another participant felt he used the university database less as his degree progressed, feeling that he had become more proficient at searching and therefore needing to spend less time reviewing sources (P.3). The student had reduced effort in literature searching to enable appropriate resources to be identified, suggesting experience curve benefits are enjoyed.

There was quite a noticeable difference in approach for the two international participants compared to their UK counterparts. One focused solely on the material posted to the virtual learning environment, while the other only looked at the reading list attached to a module and did not seek sources outside of that. Perhaps previous experience had informed them to avoid deviation away from instructed materials?

Differences also emerged with respect to using fellow students as a resource when needed. Three students stated that they worked independently;

I’m an independent person. I didn’t speak to many fellow students on doing a piece of work. (P.3)

I assume everyone is going down their own track. (P.4)

It could be that students are deterred by the university’s collusion offenseregulations, preventing them from supporting each other, and therefore, prefer to work independently. However, other participants sought support from their fellow students and deemed this an integral element of university working:

The whole university experience is about collaborative working. We have to work out what we need to do and so share ideas. (P.2)

I worked in a group of four over university. We would regularly support each other, share references or where to find it. The network provided a reassurance, you don’t want to put a lot of work into a large essay to find it is wrong. (P.5)

Not undertaking research independently for an assessment reduces individual effort in producing the assessment and meeting larger word-count requirements.

Improvements

The suggestions for improvements by the participants to help students manage word counts were split into “pre-university” and “at university.” School was felt to be more about getting students successfully through their respective exams and gaining entry to university than helping students cope once they were on a degree course. The skills needed when making the transition from school to university should be highlighted while students were at school, including key skills in researching, referencing, building an argument, and writing more critically. One participant felt the practice of longer essays was needed, although he acknowledged this would probably be linked to doing a more practically oriented BTEC award (P.1). This was endorsed by another participant, who thought schools should introduce different styles of assessment, such as “long-winded projects” (P.8).

Suggested improvements at university tended to focus on standardizing practices across modules. This is interesting, since it would potentially facilitate easier reuse or the re-application of knowledge across the degree-learning program. One participant thought each lecturer gave a bit of advice, for example, on writing critically, whereas what was needed was one universal statement (P.5). This can be seen as scaffolding for only that particular module, rather than anything more general across the degree program. Those participants who had progressed through a foundation year felt that the basic skills introduced in that year should be built into the first year of a degree. Here, smaller word-count assessments could be assessed in the first year, building up gradually over years 2 and 3. The need for formative feedback was also cited by the students:

Module assessments should have formative feedback to indicate where to improve. (P. 4)

Feedback along the way to big word counts. Also, outlines for long essays, broken down as to what goes into each section would be useful, so it’s not as daunting. (P. 2)

Conclusion and implication of themes

Using Langlois’s two ideas of knowledge reuse (and the experience curve) and economies of scale as lenses allows an answer to the question “to what extent can students draw upon their previous experience?” The brief answer is “not much.” If students had learned to manage larger assessments using these two approaches, they would be able to identify how previous work could be used to plan for the current work and also know how to work more efficiently through more effective information searching or resource sharing. The evidence that they can do this is mixed: some second- and third-year students worked collaboratively, most of the UK students had learned to use information sources, and the suggestions that the students made for improvement implied that they were aware of the skill gap between school and university. However, that the students wanted standardized assessment guidance indicates that they had problems codifying tacit knowledge into resuable knowledge and transferring it. Students wanted formative feedback, and the benefits of formative feedback are widely acknowledged (Schneider and Preckel 2017), but this looks at the outcomes of, rather than the process of, writing. None of the students suggested that they thought they needed different skills in different years for different word counts or looked at similarities between different assignment types whereby knowledge could be reused. The statements from those who took the foundation year implies that students believe that the skills were useful and could be taught.

The students’ suggestions for improvements at university do not recognize scalability as a solution: for example asking for “standardization” does not help students carry out their first systematic literature search, manage 50 downloaded PDFs, and structure their notes so that they can quickly look for commonalities. This implies that the students, like P10, believe a larger workload is a problem to which the solution is to work harder. One possible cause is that the process of writing and reflecting on the process is very rarely directly assessed in modules, and students respond more to extrinsic than intrinsic pressures (e.g. Helgeson and Patil 2014), so they do not learn new techniques.

Explicitly teaching academic writing as a set of project management skills could, particularly for business students, help with time management, even if they do not have previous experience to draw upon. Students in the business school are taught the frames of the planning fallacy and procrastination: these could be augmented by a scalability framework that has a base of reusable knowledge and embraces an economic approach. If the students know there are such things as “reuse of knowledge” and “economies of scale,” they can name the phenomena, then apply them. Once this is done, then staff can scaffold by encouraging students to, for example, share sources with coworkers to reduce effort while at the same increasing available resources. Staff could also stress prior knowledge (it was somewhat surprising that none of the participants mentioned any overlap of modules across or between years of study) to encourage students to develop resusable knowledge. Pro-forma could be developed and used across the school.

The overall approach that this study utilizes has limitations in that its findings may not be generalizable to many student cohorts. First, data were gathered from a convenience sample of second- and third-year students in one UK university. It is not therefore, possible to generalize to the whole student body, particularly those at risk in their first year. Second, this study focuses on the simple metric “word count.” It is acknowledged that some students may find writing a short, condensed piece of coursework more challenging. Third, not all school/college assessments are exclusively exam-based. Consequently, some student cohorts may have extensive experience at larger pieces of coursework. Fourth, the specific structure of the school encourages a lack of standardization and discourages staff to teach more general academic skills than “how to do this assessment.”

Finally, the authors of this article have taken writing to be “writing as process discourse” (Ivanič 2004), in part because both authors are based in a business school that requires students to create large pieces of technical, structured writing. Consequently, this requires explicit, developmental teaching that may not be appropriate for some program. Given that business degrees comprise a range of discrete disciplines, this pushes for the need for a shared meta-language about writing (Melzer 2014, 88) and for Langlois’s concept of scalability as one possible solution among many. However, the research raises awareness of an under-researched area and provides some useful pointers into the perceptions of students that should ignite interest in carrying out a larger study of this complex topic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Appendix 1

Interview Questions

1. How different are the assessments from school/college to university? In particular, how different is coursework, in terms of word-count?

2. Did you have to change your approach to doing coursework at university from that at school because of the word-count?

3. What personal strategies do you adopt in meeting word-count demands in coursework?

4. To what extent do you link with fellow students to share knowledge to manage assignments and achieve word count requirements?

5. What do you do well in respect of writing assignments and how to you apply this consistently?

6. To what extent to you use university resources to help with your coursework, particularly achieving word counts?

7. What could schools/colleges do to prepare you better for coping with large-scale assignments?

8. What could universities do to prepare you better for coping with large-scale assignments?

Table 1. Students participating in the study.

Participant No.	Gender	UK/International	Year of Degree Study
P1	M	UK	3
P2	M	UK	3
P3	M	UK	2
P4	M	International	2
P5	F	UK	3
P6	M	UK	3
P7	M	UK	3
P8	M	UK	3
P9	M	International	2
P10	F	UK	3