Dealing with Assignments

I knew one thing that most international students will be concern when they are studying in Australia, it is about the assignments. Based on my experience study in Australia, especially at ANU for almost two years, assignments are the most crucial things during the semester. At the first time, I found difficulty in doing the assignments because the assignments are quite different with what I have been done in my previous studies. The requirements of the assignments and the expectations of the lecturers are quite difficult to be fulfilled if we do not have any experience with Western education. However, we can still achieve good marks if we want to give more efforts in understanding how to do a good assignment, whether it is a presentation, essay papers or project reports.

One thing that important in which I discovered as I am experiencing in doing the assignment, especially in essay papers and report projects is we need to clearly stated our arguments or opinions. But, our arguments or opinions must be supported by credible authors or experts from journal articles. This is quite hard for international students that come from Asian education since the education shapes us to be descriptive in stating our opinion when we have to write an essay. We are afraid to state our arguments or opinion because we are not an expert, we are still a student. We are also afraid to make mistake. Changing a descriptive model of writing into an analytical model is very hard because we already experienced the descriptive model for a quite long time. This situation, generally, impedes students to obtain good mark, especially in the high distinction level. However, we can overcome this problem.

Based on my experience, as we have to write more essays, we will attain more sense of what we have to do in creating a good essay. One of my lecturer said that to have a good writing skill, one needs to practice a lot and there is no other way except that. Since we write more, we can figure out the good structure of an essay, the essay or report writing style, or the good presentation. To give more assistance in understanding of doing the good assignments, we can also ask to the education learning centre in the university. Although the consultants may not have the same study background with us, but at some stage they can give suggestions since they know the Australian education and its expectations. In addition, do not afraid to ask the lecturers about the assignment if we do not understand. The lecturers will basically be willing to have a discussion about the assignments with their students.

Assignment is not as a threaten as it looks like! In fact, we may miss it as we graduate!