Assessment: 3BM180 International Business Economics
Module Code 3BM180 Module Title International Business Economics
Level 3 Module Tutor Greig Mill
Credit Value of Module 20 Feedback Process
Type of Submission
Electronic upload to Moodle
using Turnitin Expected Feedback Date
Please see under ‘due dates’
Assessment Task A critical review (a type of essay)
Weighting 100% Word Count
4000
Due Dates
(Published Deadlines)
Informal formative draft essay
Deadline Tuesday 10 November 2015, 14.00hrs
Individual written feedback will be available by Tuesday 1 December
(Please do not stop working on your essay while awaiting feedback!)
Formal summative assessed essay
Deadline Tuesday 5 January 2016, 14.00hrs
Individual written feedback will be available by Tuesday 26 January
Assessment Regulations
• Your student number must appear on all pages.
• Pages must be numbered.
• Work should be submitted to Moodle.
• You are required to add the following declaration: “I ………… [name] declare that I am the sole author of this assignment and the work is a result of my own investigations, except where otherwise stated. All references have been duly cited”.
• Your attention is drawn to the University policy on cheating and plagiarism. Penalties will be applied where a student is found guilty of academic misconduct, including termination of programme, please see:
http://www.yorksj.ac.uk/ssr/student-systems-and-records/policies/academic-misconduct.aspx
• You are required to keep to the word limit set for an assessment and to note that you may be subject to penalty if you exceed that limit. You are required to provide an accurate word count on the cover sheet for each piece of work you submit. Please see:
University Policy On Over-Length Work,
available on the Moodle page for this module.
• For late or non-submission of work by the published deadline or an approved extended deadline, a mark of 0NS will be recorded. Where a re-assessment opportunity exists, a student will normally be permitted only one attempt to be re-assessed for a capped mark. Please see:
http://www.yorksj.ac.uk/ssr/student-systems-and-records/policies/late-non-submission.aspx
• Work must be submitted by the published deadlines above. In a small number of specific circumstances an extension to the published deadline of no more than 7 days may be granted to an individual student if they meet specific eligibility criteria. Please see:
Application for Extension of Submission Date (up to 7 days),
available on the Moodle page for this module.
• The assignment must be word processed.
• The York St John Harvard Referencing system must be used. This means that you must follow the instructions contained in the document:
*PLEASE READ* Harvard Referencing – A Guide For YSJ Students,
available on the Moodle page for this module.
Module Specific Requirements
A critical review (4000 words), 100% of assessment weighting.
Learning Outcomes
1. critically evaluate major theories of trade and/or regional integration and/or open economy macroeconomics
2. synthesize and apply knowledge from various models of international economics to topical business issues
3. reflect knowledgeably on current international economic trends and possible future outcomes
Assignment Description
Informal formative draft essay
The draft essay must be a document of no more than 3 pages in length, with no separate title page but with your name and/or student number and the module code and title clearly stated.
The draft essay should aim to demonstrate how your final critical review essay will comply with the assessment guidance notes below.
Please ensure that your draft essay includes both:
– developed text written in an appropriate style as described in the assessment guidance notes, and also
– notes indicating your plans for the entire essay.
Throughout the draft essay (both developed text and notes) you must refer to relevant publications using citations according to the Harvard system and you must provide a list of references at the end of the document. Please do not tell me that you intend to add this later – do it now!
Formal summative assessed essay
A critical review (4000 words), 100% of assessment weighting.
• Provide a critical review of a selected contemporary international business economics issue.
A critical review is a particular type of essay; further information is given below.
• Please select ONE of the following:
▪ economic growth, or
▪ currency exchange rates, or
▪ environmental economics and climate change.
• Students must follow all of the regulations and guidance notes referred to in this document. Failure to do so may result in award of a ‘fail’.
Additional Information – Assessment Guidance Notes
1. It is essential that your critical review demonstrates knowledge and understanding acquired from study of module 3BM180.
Study of module 3BM180 means the following.
You are assumed to have read all documents and other material provided on the module Moodle page, such as the module handbook, assessment instructions, information on plagiarism, on Harvard referencing, and so on.
The module proceeds with a series of lectures and seminars that you are assumed to engage with fully as follows.
Lectures explain some key ideas and also recommend publications in which these ideas are further explained and discussed. You should aim to understand these key ideas fully and to form a critical assessment of them. It is unlikely that you will achieve this by simply attending the lecture – you will need to review the lecture slides and your own notes, together with the recommended publications. In addition to explaining key ideas, lectures also act as a guide to further relevant material that is explained less thoroughly in the lecture, but which is explained and discussed in recommended publications that you should read and study independently. Overall, lectures can be viewed as a guide to what you should be reading and learning, and thus as a guide to how you should spend your time in relation to this module.
Seminars take a number of forms. For example, seminars may involve discussion of basic module information such as how to approach the assessment. Or you may be asked to read some material before the seminar, ready to discuss it. Or seminars may provide formative feedback on draft student work – and so on. Similarly to lectures, all of the activities undertaken in seminars can be seen as a guide to what you should be reading and learning, and thus as a guide to how you should spend your time in relation to this module.
Considerable emphasis is placed on reading particular recommended publications. Some of these publications are provided to you in convenient electronic form, but you will also require hardcopy items that are available in limited quantities in the library. Part of your study of this module involves planning ahead to ensure that you obtain the publications that you need in a timely manner, by borrowing items for copying or scanning, or purchasing your own copies.
From the above it follows that in order to demonstrate knowledge and understanding acquired from study of this module (as the assessment requires) your critical review must – as a minimum – discuss ideas and publications that are referred to in lectures and seminars. Work which does not do this will be assessed as a ‘fail’.
The above describes a fairly basic approach to studying the module. There are additional things that you can do in order to achieve higher marks – please see notes 5, 6 and 7 in particular below.
2. This module considers international business economics issues in three areas:
▪ economic growth, or
▪ currency exchange rates, or
▪ environmental economics and climate change.
You must select ONE of these, and provide a critical review of issues considered in the module ie in lectures, seminars and recommended reading.
3. You must include your name and/or student number, the module code (3BM180) and the title of your critical review (eg ‘Economic Growth’, or ‘Currency Exchange Rates’) at the beginning of the document.
All pages must be numbered.
Single line spacing should be used throughout.
The minimum font size is 11 point.
Please do not provide an abstract or executive summary or a table of contents (a document with these features would typically be called a report, not an essay – recall that a ‘critical review’ is a type of essay).
Any tables or figures must be labelled similar to:
Figure 1: Demand and Production Possibility Frontiers.
If the table or figure uses information from a publication, then a citation is also needed, similar to:
Figure 1: Demand and Production Possibility Frontiers.(Reinert 2012, p35).
Do not use appendices; any figures or tables should be inserted in the main text close to where they are discussed.
4. You must use the Harvard system to acknowledge publications that you have consulted and to provide evidence to support any claims that you make. The Harvard system is sometimes called the name-date system since in-text citations are in the format: (Reinert 2012).
Citations must be used whenever your critical review mentions something that you know because you have read about it somewhere, to acknowledge the person who wrote it.
Internet addresses should almost never be shown in the main text of your essay; instead provide a citation using the Harvard name-date format eg (BBC News 2014). Full information including the web address is then provided in your list of references.
Your critical review will often take ideas that you have read about and explain these using your own words, to show that you understand – this is called paraphrasing. Whenever you paraphrase, you need a citation.
Rarely, you may want to reproduce exactly the words written by someone else; this is a quotation. Wherever you include a quotation you need more than just a citation – also the exact words reproduced must be in quotation marks “like this” and the citation should include the page number.
Lectures and similar University teaching material will of course be used to prepare your essay, but you should NOT include citations for these eg NOT (Mill 2014). Part of the purpose of most lectures is to draw your attention to publications that you should read – it is these publications that you should cite (and read).
You must provide a reference list at the end of your critical review giving full information of each publication cited in the text. This should be a single list (not separate lists for books, web publications, etc) in alphabetical order by author surname. There are precise rules about exactly how this should be done; please see the document:
*PLEASE READ* Harvard Referencing – A Guide For YSJ Students,
available on the Moodle page for this module.
/cont…
There are no hard-and-fast rules regarding how many publications should be in your reference list, but it is unlikely that a good critical review for this module will have a reference list containing fewer than 10 publications.
Please note that good quality university work should NEVER cite publications such as Wikipedia (unreliable), Tutor2u (inappropriate), etc. Similarly, for good quality academic work of the required standard it is almost never appropriate to rely upon a dictionary to establish the meaning of key terms, since you have access to specialist publications with better information. If you find Wikipedia, dictionaries, etc, helpful as aids to your study, that is OK – but you must progress on to appropriate use of textbooks, academic journal papers, etc., in your final essay.
5. The preceding guidance notes aim to explain the essential requirements of the assessment required for a ‘pass’. Once you have met these essential requirements, additional marks are available for things such as:
– demonstrating detailed, critical or insightful understanding of relevant theory
– finding interesting real-world data or case study examples and explaining how
these relate to the general issues or illustrate academic theories
– demonstrating your understanding of relevant good quality academic
publications (eg located using YSJ library databases Emerald, Business Source
Premier, Web of Science or Academic Onefile in preference to material found
using web search engines)
– demonstrating an awareness of different points of view, of how they relate to each
other and of how they can reasonably coexist
– demonstrating an appreciation of linkages: how ideas fit together
– overall clarity and insight demonstrated in your essay style and structure
– achieving an overall ‘critical essay’ style (please see further explanation below).
6. The logical structure of your critical review is important in demonstrating your academic skills and your understanding of the topic.
Your critical review should begin with a paragraph describing the aim of the essay and the structure of what follows.
Your critical review should have clear sections on well-defined topics that relate to each other in a logical way that develops the points you are making. These sections can be defined either using headings or by explaining what is happening in your text (eg above X was considered; Y is also important, this is considered next…).
Paragraphs are an important way of organizing what you write. The basic idea is that each paragraph should explore a single coherent idea; a new idea needs a new paragraph. It is good to keep paragraphs fairly short. There is no hard-and-fast rule about paragraph length but as a rough guide you should try not to exceed 10 to 15 lines of text, with many paragraphs shorter than this.
/cont…
Since each paragraph contains an idea, and most ideas in your critical review come from things that you have read, this implies that most paragraphs will contain at least one citation.
The critical review should end with a paragraph (possibly two or three paragraphs) of conclusions. Any critical review of this type is very unlikely to reach a dramatic conclusion – don’t try. It is usually best to view the conclusion of your critical review as a summary of the main points previously made. This means that you will not usually introduce new material in the concluding paragraph(s). Providing a concise and insightful conclusion is another way in which you can demonstrate your good understanding, and so achieve higher marks.
7. It is important to understand what is meant here by a ‘critical review’. Essentially a critical review is an essay of a particular type. The key characteristic of a ‘critical review’ as opposed to any other kind of essay is that it must demonstrate a sensitive appreciation that the topic under consideration is ‘contested’. This means that there is no single, universally-agreed, correct point of view.
The main aim in a critical review is not to discover who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’ but instead to demonstrate a thoughtful, balanced and detailed understanding of different perspectives on the topic, of how they relate to each other, and of how it is possible for reasonable people to disagree on such matters.
8. If you are in any doubt about any of the above, please discuss this with the module leader at your first opportunity. These matters are also discussed in seminars.
Assessment Criteria
Please see below
3BM180 International Business Economics: Critical Review (essay)
Assessed Components A* A B C D F (fail) F (fail) 0 NS
(100-85) (84 – 70) (69 – 60) (59 – 50) (49 – 40) (39 -20) (19 – 1) F (0) 0NS
Knowledge & Understanding Work of outstanding performance
Excellent understanding of a wide range of ideas
Insightful explanation of key theories or concepts, their limitations and real-world limitations
Very good understanding of a range of ideas
Very good explanation of key theories or concepts, with appreciation of limitations and real-world limitations
Good understanding of relevant ideas
Good explanation of relevant theories or concepts, with some appreciation of real-world applications
Fair understanding of a few relevant ideas
Some explanation of relevant theories or concepts and applications
Subject knowledge is poorly demonstrated
Inadequate explanation of relevant theories or concepts
Non-serious attempt
Little engagement with relevant theories or concepts
Analysis & Evaluation
Excellent ability to analyse, evaluate, compare and construct values
Insightful consideration of a range of key ideas; clear and logical justification
Accurate analysis and very good evaluation
Very good consideration of a range of key ideas; clear and logical justification
Good analysis and sound evaluation
Good consideration of a range of relevant ideas; mainly clear and logical justification
Fair analysis with some evaluation
Some consideration of a range of relevant ideas; with some justification
Weak analysis and evaluation
Inadequate consideration of relevant ideas
Non-serious attempt
Little consideration of relevant ideas
Critical
Thinking Excellent thinking, logical and creative with insightful outcomes
Insightful and concise structure and conclusions; a strong sense of ongoing academic debate
Very good synthesis of ideas that are articulated clearly
Very good structure and conclusions; a sense of ongoing academic debate
Good synthesis of ideas with mostly consistent logic
Good structure and conclusions with some sense of ongoing academic debate
Logical with some synthesis of ideas
Mainly logical structure, reasonably concise, some awareness of academic debate
Inconsistent logic and synthesis
Inadequate logical structure or awareness of academic debate Non-serious attempt
Little structure or awareness of academic debate
Presentation & Referencing
Technically excellent, accurate referencing and presentation
Excellent detailed attention to assessment instructions and academic conventions
Accurate and consistent referencing and presentation
Very good attention to assessment instructions and academic conventions
Good referencing and consistent approach to conventions
Good attention to assessment instructions and academic conventions
Fair understanding of convention
Mainly good attention to assessment instructions and academic conventions
Poor referencing and little understanding of conventions
Inadequate attention to assessment instructions Non-serious attempt
Little apparent attention to assessment instructions
Communication Excellent ability to communicate ideas clearly and appropriately Very good ability to communicate ideas clearly
Most Ideas communicated effectively
Ideas are communicated with some success
Ideas are not communicated effectively
Ideas are not communicated effectively