 I think the biggest thing that students tend to get wrong in particularly their first assignment at first year is not actually fully understanding what we're looking for when we're assessing their work. When tutors are marking assignments they are looking for certain elements and very often I often say to first year students find out what your tutor wants and give it to them. My top three tips for running your first assignment would be firstly learn what your referencing style is and use it correctly. Secondly, reference journal article. Even if they don't ask you to it's expected of your university. And three, learn how to read and use your turn it in report to avoid plagiarism. When students preparing work from experience either an experiment or a field trip or they've gone to visit an industry placement or something like that. They should have a really strong body of evidence around what they've actually experienced and that's possibly the biggest thing that students tend to overlook when they're preparing a report from that sort of experience. They tend to not think that their evidence and their view and their data actually has meaning. When you first start at university it can feel like your lecturers are trying to trip you up or catch you out with their markings. But actually if you go into your blackboard site for every unit and every assignment you should find a marking rubric. The marking rubric is normally a grid and it will have descriptors for each thing they're marking you on. Look at it before you start your assignment so that you know who you're writing for and what they want. And then when you finish your draft go through and look at it again and make sure that you've done everything in the rubric to the highest standard that you can. High distinction students will have covered all of the rubrics and all of the criteria on the rubrics. Their writing will be so seamless that you cannot see any mistakes so it's impossible to pick out mistakes. They will have answered the question fully. They will have dealt with it in a very thorough way by referring to the work of others. Their main idea will be clear. They've probably identified their thesis statement or their main idea very early in the piece say no later than the end of the introduction and that would be reflected totally throughout all the paragraphs and in the concluding show. A lot of people when they start writing assignments you read the background research and then you write your assignment. You might copy paste some of the background research into a document and then edit it into an assignment or you might just try and remember it in your head and then write the assignment. So you read and then you write. I'm here to tell you that that doesn't work. You're missing the middle step which is taking notes. About 50% of students don't take notes which is really unfortunate because we know it helps you to get higher marks. When you're reading there's no way that you can hold all of that information you had and integrate it and paraphrase it properly in an easy way. So instead of going straight to writing take some notes. There's lots of different ways you can take notes. You can take them on a computer. You can take them in dock points. You can set up a table in Microsoft Excel and fill in the table for each paper but as long as you have a note taking step. So you read, you take notes and then you write from your notes. Not from the original research. This helps you to synthesize and integrate information better. So we find that students who don't take notes typically get a pass or a credit whereas students who do use notes are easily able to get distinctions and high distinctions because they can show to their lecturer that they're using critical thinking and synthesizing and integrating much more information at a higher level.