In some of the courses you will be doing as part of your degree, a good deal of emphasis will be be placed on getting you to produce essays and on assessing how effectively you do it. There are two main reasons for this: supporting your developing understanding of the issues and material involved in your courses; and enabling you to acquire research and writing skills that will be useful to you both within and beyond the degree context.
As far as developing your understanding of your discipline goes, you will need to get to grips with a wide range of new concepts, issues and methods of inquiry. The aim of a degree-level essay is not primarily to show how many facts you know or how comprehensive your knowledge is. That is not to say that learning new facts is unimportant, but even more important are your appreciation of how those facts fit together, and your ability to use them to discuss or argue about a range of issues. Essay work aims to help you develop several abilities that tutors consider important to being an effective student. These abilities will continue to be of use to you beyond your degree course. Whatever occupation you take up will most likely include some component of preparing papers or reports that are intended to convey information effectively to other people, and to convince them of some particular point of view. Like writing essays, this involves:
The most general transferable skills that are promoted by essay work include: