The following winning essay was submitted in 2009 by a UK higher education student for an essay writing competition sponsored by the LearnHigher Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) network. The set title was 'What is the point of referencing?', and there was a maximum word limit of 1,500 words. There is a tutor commentary on the points made by the student to the left of the ess...

In a review of three books about the proper distribution of health care for vulnerable people, Menzel concludes that Larry R. Churchill's Rationing Health Care in America: Perceptions and Principles of Justice, Charles J. Dougherty's American Health Care: Realities, Rights, and Reforms, and Timothy M. Smeeding's Should Medical Care Be Rationed by Age? all contribute to the discussion but in ver...

The PRC was established on 1 Oct, 1949 as a communist country. Mao Zedong became the Chairman of the Central People’s Government Council and officially announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. He was the first leader of the PRC. After the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping resumed all his duties and his influence continued to grow in the following 20 years. He gradually be...

Homology [4] is a central concept of comparative and evolutionary biology, referring to the presence of the same bodily parts (e.g., morphological structures) in different species. The existence of homologies is explained by common ancestry, and according to modern definitions of homology, two structures in different species are homologous if they are derived from the same structure in the comm...

I declare that this essay is work done as part of the Part III Examination. I have read and understood the Statement on Plagiarism for Part III and Graduate Courses issued by the Faculty of Mathematics, and have abided by it. This essay is the result of my own work, and except where explicitly stated otherwise, only includes material undertaken since the publication of the list of essay titles,...

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is an automated, statistical technique for comparing the semantic similarity of words or documents. In this paper, I examine the application of LSA to automated essay scoring. I compare LSA methods to earlier statistical methods for assessing essay quality, and critically review contemporary essay-scoring systems built on LSA, including the Intelligent Essay Asses...

In this paper we describe an application of weighted abductive theorem proving that is used to create a model of students’ qualitative reasoning for the Why2-Atlas tutoring system. The system encourages a student to write an essay in natural language so that the essay provides both an explanation as well as an answer to a qualitative mechanics problem. The student’s essay is first mapped into a...

I declare that this essay is work done as part of the Part III Examination. I have read and understood the Statement of Plagiarism for Part III and Graduate Courses issued by the Faculty of Mathematics, and have abided by it. This essay is the result of my own work and, except where explicitly stated otherwise, only includes material undertaken since the publication of the list of essay titles,...