6. Feedback Assessment 1

BMS 405 PUBLIC RELATIONS III

HANDOUT 6: FEEDBACK ASSESSMENT 1

TASK

Why should people who work in public relations behave in an ethical way? Give examples of some bad practice in PR and explain what can be done to overcome this. (About 1,700 words). The essay is worth 40 percent of the total assessment for this course.

FEEDBACK

A total of 40 marks were available for this essay. Table 1 shows how marks were divided.

No of marks	Attributes
0 - 10	Structure of essay, use of sources, use of language (spelling, punctuation etc.)
11 - 30	Content. This includes definitions of ethics, why PR people should be ethical, concerns over how PR people are not being ethical and how PR people can show they can be ethical.

Table 2 shows the range of marks students received. The pass mark was 20.

Marks	No of students
20 – 23 Fair (D)	1
24 – 27 Good (C)	12
28 – 31 Very Good (B)	10
32 – 40 Excellent (A)	3
TOTAL	26

Comments on essays

No student did a bad essay, but students lost marks for a number of reasons. Here are some of the main ones. 

Structure: 

Some students lost marks because their essay was poorly structured (they moved from one point to another and then back again), or they missed out important parts of the essay completely (or didn’t write enough). A good structure would be as follows.

1 Introduction – what the essay sets out to show.

2 Definition of ‘ethics’. A short definition is enough.

3 Why PR people in particular should behave in an ethical way.

4 How PR people are behaving unethically. Give examples from the real world to illustrate this.

5 What PR people can do to show they can behave ethically: for example, the role of professional associations and codes of conduct.

6 Conclusions – perhaps with recommendations on what PR people still need to do to demonstrate they are ethical.

Sources:

Not all sources of information were referenced. Some were referenced, but not properly. For example, in the text when you cite a source you should give the author’s name, year of publication and page number of the book / article where the information is contained. All this goes in brackets at the end of the sentence you are referencing e.g. (Rooney, 2009, p.17). 

Websites should be referenced in the text in the same way as books and articles, but it is usually not possible to give a page number. i.e. give author, date of publication e.g. (Rooney, 2009). If the author of the website is not known you could give the title of the website e.g. (Public Relations Association of America). 

Do not put the website link in the essay e.g. (www.google.com) – put this in the references / bibliography at the end of the essay/

Academic style:

In an essay (or other academic work) you should not write in the first person e.g. ‘I think PR people need to behave more ethically.’ We are not interested in your personal opinions; rather we are interested in your argument. So say, academics such as White (2010, p.201), Green (2011, p.13) and Brown (1999, p.13) say PR people should behave more ethically …

Do not make assertions without giving evidence. E.g ‘Many people say PR people do not behave ethically.’ Say who it is who says this and reference your sources of information.

The question as set:

Make sure you read the question as it is given. The essay was about the ethical behavior of PR people. Some students wrote about the general work PR people do without always linking this to ethical behavior. 

Also, some students seemed to want to write all there is to know about PR, including its history. Make sure you stay focused on the actual question.