As a graduate of a public university who now serves as a faculty member at another, I have finally found myself behind the scenes, uncovering the answers to the questions I once had as a student.

Truth be told, there is no proper marking scheme in public universities. While foreign universities train lecturers or tutors to evaluate answers using a detailed guide or rubric that allocates specific points for correct steps, keywords, or arguments, no such guideline or training exists among faculties in public universities. Scripts are marked overwhelmingly on judgement, making the process inherently psychological, far more than students assume, and arguably more than it should.

While the ultimate advantage will always be genuine diligence and hard work, understanding the psychology of the person grading your paper can prevent you from losing marks to poor presentation rather than poor knowledge. Before proceeding further, kindly note that the following points should be read with a pinch of satire and viewed as my personal opinion rather than objective, universal facts targeting any specific institution or faculty.

1. Maintain proper format, margins, and cleanliness

Use headings before each answer, bullet points, figures, and tables where they help, proper margins on each paper, and, crucially, answer the questions in the order they were asked. An examiner working through a hundred-odd scripts across several courses is operating, whether consciously or not, under real limits of time and attention. The human brain prefers information that is easy to process, a concept psychologists call “cognitive ease”. It is the well-documented finding that information which is easier to take in tends to be judged more favourably, independent of its actual content, simply because ease of comprehension registers as a signal of quality.

A disorganised, messy script physically and psychologically drains a faculty member. If they have to fight through chaotic formatting to find your core argument, their frustration will inadvertently colour their assessment of your intelligence. A script with a clear visual structure costs the reader less effort, and that saved effort tends to convert into patience with the argument underneath it. A script that buries its point in an unbroken wall of text, or answers questions out of sequence, does the opposite. It forces the examiner to search for the specific fact or step that earns a mark, and in a large pile of scripts, whatever cannot be found quickly is often treated, for grading purposes, as though it were never written at all. Make it as easy as possible for the examiner to comprehend your answers.

2. Ensure clean handwriting

It doesn’t need to be beautiful. It needs to be legible and clearly readable, each letter not too small, but not too big either. Students frequently write brilliant answers that are entirely lost to rushed, indecipherable scribbles. Researchers who study writing assessment have repeatedly documented what they call the handwriting legibility effect. When an identical essay is transcribed into a neat version and a messy one and given to trained examiners, the neat version reliably scores higher. More troubling still, at least one study tested whether training examiners to guard against this bias could eliminate it and found that it could not. Trained and untrained graders showed the same preference for neat handwriting. This is not examiners being deliberately unfair. It is what happens, largely below conscious awareness, when a reader’s brain is asked to do more work than it has time for. No matter how good a dish tastes, if it looks inedible, very few people will taste it at all.

3. The first semester is the most important

The first semester matters more than most students realise. This is something of an open secret in departments with large student bodies. None of it is an accusation against anyone’s hard work. It’s just an observation about incentives. In larger departments in terms of student populations, faculties are often brought in as second examiners to grade exams for courses they don’t even teach, paid per script on top of their normal teaching load. Marking more than a hundred long exam scripts across several courses is exhausting, and when graders get tired, they may skim instead of reading closely, basing the mark on whatever impression they already have of that student.

Three forces tend to push in the same direction here. The first is the halo effect: a good impression in one area spills over and shapes how we judge someone in another. A student seen early on as “strong” tends to get the benefit of the doubt later, not through favouritism, but simply because that’s how our minds take shortcuts. The second force is fatigue itself. Studies of repetitive marking show that a grader’s attention and leniency can shift over a long session, and even a rubric doesn’t fully stop this. The third, simpler force is belief. A strong start changes how capable a student believes they are, and that belief shapes how much effort they put in afterwards. This matters most in the middle years of a degree, when it’s hardest to stay focused and hardest to catch up once you fall behind.

None of this means you can coast once you’ve had a good first semester. If anything, it’s the opposite. It is a good reason to take that first semester seriously. A great early grade earns you a reputation, and that reputation is what keeps you in the “safe zone” the next time a tired grader is skimming instead of reading closely.

4. Sharpen your English

Nearly every exam in a public university is conducted in English. An examiner can only credit understanding that has been successfully communicated. When the expression is unclear, the examiner cannot tell the difference between “does not understand” and “understands, but cannot say so”. Poor grammar and fractured sentence construction obscure your subject knowledge. Conversely, sophisticated sentence formation and clear articulation trigger the fluency heuristic, signalling to the examiner that you possess a deep, organised understanding of the material. Improving your English is not just a language skill. It is a critical academic weapon.

Most departments in public universities don’t include even a basic English course in their syllabus, and the few that do rarely teach it well enough to make a real difference. Invest in your English proficiency anyway. It’s not just about better grades; it’s a skill that will give you an edge over the competition in every sector. Look outside your department. Plenty of institutions, both online and offline, offer courses worth enrolling in.

5. Avoid repetition and irrelevant information

There is a pervasive myth among students that more pages translate to more marks. This strategy consistently backfires. When students lack actual knowledge, they often resort to repeating the same point, padding pages with irrelevant details, or blabbering out of context. Examiners are subject-matter experts. They can instantly distinguish “signal” (actual answers) from “noise” (filler). Writing pages of fluff does not create an illusion of competence. It projects desperation and a profound lack of preparation.

They dilute the useful content in exactly the same way disorganisation does, forcing the examiner to filter substance from noise under the same time pressure described earlier. It wastes the examiner’s time and is almost always assessed negatively. Be concise. Focus on writing down each key point once, but in detail, and use examples whenever applicable. This shows that you not only have a comprehensive understanding but are also able to relate your knowledge to the practical world.

6. Misconceptions to avoid

A common misconception is that faculties award grades based on personal bias. Do not waste your energy achieving faculty favouritism. Being in a faculty member’s “good graces” provides no tangible benefit. Structurally, this is nearly impossible. The public university examination system is built on anonymity and redundancy. Exam scripts are stripped of names and evaluated blindly. Furthermore, they are independently checked by two separate examiners. If there is a discrepancy of over 20% between the two grades, a third examiner is brought in to resolve it. Personal bias cannot survive a double-blind grading system. Your focus must remain on the script, not the professor.

Do not waste your energy trying to game the system through rote memorisation either. Memorising is not the same as understanding. Memorisation does not prove analytical ability or practical relevance. Cognitive psychologists distinguish between shallow processing, encoding the surface form of information such as its exact wording, and deep processing, which engages with its meaning. Deep processing produces stronger, more durable, more flexible knowledge. An answer built on deep processing can bend to fit however a question is phrased; one built on memorised slides and provided materials cannot, and experienced examiners can usually tell the two apart on sight because rote text rarely adapts to the specific question asked.

Rote memorisation might get you through an exam, but it rarely survives contact with the real world. The workplace doesn’t test whether you can recite a formula or a definition on command; it tests whether you can apply what you know to a problem you’ve never seen before, often with incomplete information and no answer key. There’s a simpler truth behind all this too. In an age when a phone in your pocket can retrieve almost any fact in seconds, memorised information isn’t scarce or valuable on its own anymore. What matters in a job and in life is the judgement to know which information is relevant and the ability to use it.

More pages do not mean more marks. This follows the same logic as point five. Length that isn’t backed by content reads as compensation for uncertainty, not command of the material, and examiners learn to recognise the pattern the way any evaluator in any field learns to distinguish real thoroughness from padding.

7. Most importantly – Put in the effort

No matter how skilled you are at psychological manipulation, you cannot achieve good results without a genuine, detailed understanding of the subject. Academic success is not a product of raw intelligence or a God-gifted IQ. It is determined by the amount of effort you invest.

Public universities afford students a large amount of leisure time, which should be capitalised on at home. Do not wait until the final days or weeks before an exam to cram. Instead, pay attention in class and strive to understand subjects logically rather than through memorisation. An hour of active revision each day, spent going back over what was actually covered in class, will do more for a final grade than any of the six points above combined.

A landmark 2006 review spanning hundreds of experiments found that material revisited across several short sessions is retained far better than the same number of hours compressed into the days before an exam.

Finally, do not rely solely on your professor’s slides. We live in an era of unprecedented access to information. Search YouTube for videos to clarify complex topics covered in class, or utilise AI as a personal learning assistant.

In the modern world, there is absolutely no excuse for being incapable of self-educating or finding the necessary information to succeed.

Disclaimer: None of this is a trick in the sinister sense. Examiners are not adversaries to be outwitted. They are tired, overworked readers doing their best within an imperfect system, and most of what is described above is simply what it means to write for a reader rather than at one. Psychological savvy, in the end, is a floor, not a ceiling. It protects the marks a script has already earned. It has never, in any system, created a mark that was not already there.

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Asim Abrar is a development practitioner and he is currently teaching as a lecturer at the Department of Coastal Studies and Disaster Management, Barishal University