What does “critical analysis” actually look like in an essay?
Info: 3100 words (12 pages) Blog
Published: 14 Jul 2026
Every student has met the phrase. It sits in module handbooks, marking criteria and feedback comments with a confidence that suggests everyone knows precisely what it means: demonstrate critical analysis. Alongside it come its equally slippery companions – “coherent argument”, “synthesis of sources”, “evaluative depth”. These terms govern your grades, yet nobody seems able to define them in a way that tells you what to actually do at the keyboard on a Tuesday night.
This is not your failing, and it is not really your lecturer’s either. It is a structural feature of how academic standards work. A substantial body of research now shows that the qualities markers reward are partly tacit – they live in the trained judgement of experienced academics rather than in words on a criteria sheet – and that the most reliable way to make them visible is not a better marking rubric but a concrete example: a real essay in which “critical analysis” is actually happening, on the page, where you can point at it.
This article looks at what that research says, why written criteria alone so often fail, and how to use model answers or exemplars to decode what your markers actually want.
The problem: standards that words cannot fully carry
The foundational insight comes from Royce Sadler, who argued as far back as 1987 that achievement standards are partly tacit and cannot be fully codified in verbal descriptors alone; exemplars and verbal descriptions work best together (Sadler, 1987). A marking rubric can tell you that a first-class essay “critically evaluates competing perspectives”, but the sentence is circular unless you already know what critical evaluation looks like in prose. The words describe the destination without showing the route.
O’Donovan, Price and Rust (2004) developed this into a broader account of how assessment knowledge transfers: explicit statements of criteria and tacit, experience-based understanding are complementary, and students only genuinely grasp standards when the two are combined. Their memorably titled paper – Know what I mean? – captures the everyday frustration exactly. Your tutor does know what critical analysis means. The problem is that much of that knowledge was absorbed over years of reading, marking and moderating, and it resists compression into bullet points.
The empirical literature bears this out with unusual consistency. Across a systematic review of educational uses of exemplars, the core claim recurs: written criteria alone are often too abstract, while exemplars make standards tangible by embedding them in authentic performances (To, Panadero and Carless, 2021). Studies in first-year law found exemplars and marking discussion more useful to students than criteria sheets alone (Hendry, Bromberger and Armstrong, 2011), and similar results appear in biology, mathematics education, business, medicine, design, translation and English for academic purposes (Yucel et al., 2014; Hendry and Anderson, 2013; Lee, 2024; Rashid-Doubell, O’Farrell and Fredericks, 2018; Hendry and Tomitsch, 2014; Li and Ke, 2024; Curtis, Chong and Kong, 2025). This is not a quirk of one discipline. It is how tacit knowledge behaves everywhere: research on cultural transmission suggests tacit skill is hard to transmit through words alone or imitation alone, and instead requires guided participation, selective attention and practice (Miton and Dedeo, 2022; Moskvichev, Tikhonov and Steyvers, 2023).
What a model answer makes visible
So what does the exemplar do that the rubric cannot? In short, it converts opaque criteria into visible features of actual student work (Carless and Chan, 2017). Exemplars help students notice what experts notice – which is itself a central tacit skill in academic judgement (Carless et al., 2018).
Consider what “critical analysis” looks like when it is enacted rather than described. In a strong essay you can literally point at it:
- A claim is stated, then immediately qualified. “Smith’s model explains X convincingly, but only under conditions that rarely hold in practice.” The second clause is the analysis; the first alone would be description.
- Sources are put in tension rather than in sequence. A descriptive essay reports Smith, then Jones, then Patel. A critical one writes: “Where Smith attributes the effect to Y, Jones’s longitudinal data suggest Z – a discrepancy that neither study addresses.” That single sentence is what “synthesis” means.
- Evidence is weighed, not just cited. “Although widely cited, the study rests on a sample of 40 undergraduates, which limits its transferability” – evaluation of warrant, not just content.
- The argument accumulates. Each paragraph ends slightly further forward than it began, and the essay’s final position could not have been written as its opening line.
- Counter-arguments are entertained and answered, rather than ignored or demolished with a strawman.
None of these moves is mysterious once you have seen it labelled in context. All of them are nearly impossible to reverse-engineer from the phrase “demonstrates critical engagement with the literature”. This is precisely the gap that exemplar pedagogy fills, and it is why students in study after study report clearer expectations, better understanding of criteria, stronger confidence and improved evaluative judgement after exemplar work (Hawe, Lightfoot and Dixon, 2017; Urbano, 2020; Lee, 2024; Li and Ke, 2024). First Ink, a magazine of exemplary academic writing “by students, for students”, was founded on exactly this premise (Clough, 2024).
Reading is not enough: the passive-active divide
Here the research delivers its most important caveat, and it should shape how you use every model answer you ever obtain. The corpus repeatedly contrasts passive distribution of model answers with mediated, dialogic use of exemplars: students learn less from unannotated self-study exemplars than from sessions where peers and teachers unpack why the work earned a given grade (Chong, 2021; Hendry and Jukic, 2014).
The pattern of the passive approach is depressingly familiar. You download the model essay, read it through, feel a warm sense of clarity – ah, so that’s what they want – and close the tab. Research suggests that this feeling is largely illusory. Gains in perceived clarity do not always translate into better performance (Handley and Williams, 2011; Carter et al., 2018), and exemplars alone were insufficient in medical short-answer training, where students also needed practice writing and marking others’ work (Rashid-Doubell, O’Farrell and Fredericks, 2018). Hendry, White and Herbert (2016) found that the teacher’s explanation of why an exemplar earned its grade was a decisive ingredient, not an optional extra.
What works instead is active, evaluative engagement. The strongest studies converge on process: students learn most when they mark, compare, discuss and revise against exemplars, with guidance and dialogue (To and Carless, 2016; Orsmond, Merry and Reiling, 2002; Hendry, Armstrong and Bromberger, 2012). In Yucel and colleagues’ first-year biology study (2014), marking exemplars before peer review measurably developed students’ capacity to judge the quality of a scientific report. Carless and Chan (2017) describe the ideal as dialogic use: students judge first, justify their judgements, hear peers’ rationales, and only then hear how the marker interprets the same features. Smyth and Carless (2020) theorise this as mediated learning from exemplars – the exemplar is a catalyst for guided judgement, not an answer sheet. Even co-constructing the rubric alongside exemplars helps, because rubrics on their own aren’t enough (Bacchus et al., 2020), and structured dialogue around writing is itself a well-evidenced booster of academic writing skill (Schillings et al., 2018; To and Liu, 2018; Mansi, 2021).
The practical translation for the independent learner: interrogate the exemplar as a marker would, not as a reader would. Grade it before you know its grade. Annotate every move it makes. Ask of every paragraph: what is this doing that mine doesn’t?
Sourcing exemplars: departments, banks, services and AI
The classic obstacle is supply. Departments vary enormously in whether they release model answers, and when they do, the exemplar rarely matches your exact question, level and referencing style. This is where the wider exemplar ecosystem – published essay banks, custom essay writing services and AI essay writers – becomes genuinely useful, provided the research findings above govern how you use what they produce.
A model answer purchased from an essay writing service such as UK Essays or generated by an AI writer such as Uniwriter has one distinctive advantage over a departmental exemplar: it can be bespoke. You can obtain a model response to your precise question, at your level, in your discipline’s conventions – which matters, because standards are discipline-specific performances, not generic virtues (Hendry and Anderson, 2013; Li and Ke, 2024).
Indeed, the tools themselves are increasingly built around this principle: the Uniwriter team, for instance, has developed dedicated models in LawWriter.ai and BusinessEssays.ai precisely because what counts as “critical analysis” in a problem question on negligence looks quite different from what counts in a strategic analysis of a company’s market position. A discipline-tuned model gives you an exemplar that enacts your field’s conventions – its authority structures, its citation habits, its characteristic moves – rather than a generic approximation of academic writing.
Used the way the research recommends, such a model becomes a private version of the exemplar workshop:
- Draft first, or at least plan first. As earlier articles in this blog have argued, an exemplar encountered before you have formed your own position tends to become a template; encountered afterwards, it becomes feedback.
- Mark the model against your marking criteria/rubric. Assign it a grade, criterion by criterion, and write a justification for each. This is the single activity most consistently associated with developing evaluative judgement (Yucel et al., 2014; Carless et al., 2018).
- Label the moves. Go through with a highlighter and tag every instance of the criteria-words: here is synthesis; here is a counter-argument being answered; here is evaluation of methodology. You are building a personal glossary of what the abstract terms look like in prose.
- Exploit the technology’s flexibility. An AI writer can produce a 2:2-standard and a first-class answer to the same question on request – and the research on contrasting exemplars (covered in the previous article in this series) suggests the comparison between them teaches more than either alone. You can also ask a service or an AI to annotate its own model, explaining why each move was made; this approximates the teacher explanation that Hendry, White and Herbert (2016) found so important.
- Return to your own draft and revise. Transfer happens at the point of application, not at the point of reading (To, Panadero and Carless, 2021).
Two cautions from the literature, stated briefly. First, several studies warn that exemplars can be misread as templates to imitate, especially when scaffolding is weak or students lack the domain knowledge to apply what they notice (Wu, 2019; Chong, 2021) – so the model’s moves are what you are extracting, never its sentences or its structure wholesale. Wu’s (2019) distinction is useful: mimicry copies surface features; emulation reproduces the underlying strategy in your own material. The second is the goal.
Second, lower-confidence students may need more structured support alongside exemplars rather than exemplars alone (Hendry, White and Herbert, 2016; Croce, 2019) – if you are early in your degree, pairing exemplar work with a writing-centre appointment or study group discussion mirrors the peer-dialogue conditions under which the research effects were achieved (She and Diao, 2023).
How strong is the evidence?
It is worth being honest about the shape of the evidence, because you deserve the caveats. The claim that exemplars clarify standards better than written criteria alone is strong, repeated across foundational theory, reviews and many classroom studies (To, Panadero and Carless, 2021; Hendry, Armstrong and Bromberger, 2012; Newlyn, 2013; She and Diao, 2023). The claim that dialogue around exemplars is the key mechanism is similarly well supported (To and Carless, 2016; Mansi, 2021). Evidence that exemplar work improves actual performance is moderate: positive findings recur = including recent work showing text exemplars unlocking genre knowledge and improving argumentative essay quality (Mombaers, Van Gasse and De Maeyer, 2025) – but not all studies show achievement gains, and many rely on student perceptions or post-intervention designs (Carter et al., 2018). And the claim that exemplars alone are sufficient is weak; several studies directly question or refute sufficiency (Rashid-Doubell, O’Farrell and Fredericks, 2018; Greener, 2017).
Read as a whole, the literature’s message is coherent: exemplars communicate tacit knowledge and academic standards most effectively when they are used as catalysts for guided judgement, not as answers to copy.
Seeing the invisible
“Critical analysis” stops being mystical the moment you watch it happen in a real essay – a claim qualified, two sources set against each other, a method weighed and found wanting. Model answers are the technology by which universities’ hidden expectations become visible, and the research is clear about the operating instructions: judge before you read the verdict, annotate rather than absorb, compare rather than copy, and carry what you find back into your own draft.
Whether the exemplar comes from your department’s archive, a custom essay service or an AI writer matters far less than whether you meet it with a highlighter in hand and a draft of your own on the desk.
References
Bacchus, R., Colvin, E., Knight, E. and Ritter, L. (2020). When rubrics aren’t enough: Exploring exemplars and student rubric co-construction. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 17, pp. 48–61. doi: 10.1080/15505170.2019.1627617.
Carless, D. and Chan, K. (2017). Managing dialogic use of exemplars. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 42, pp. 930–941. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2016.1211246.
Carless, D., Chan, K., To, J., Lo, M. and Barrett, E. (2018). Developing students’ capacities for evaluative judgement through analysing exemplars. In: Developing Evaluative Judgement in Higher Education, pp. 108–116. doi: 10.4324/9781315109251-12.
Carter, R., Salamonson, Y., Ramjan, L. M. and Halcomb, E. (2018). Students’ use of exemplars to support academic writing in higher education: An integrative review. Nurse Education Today, 65, pp. 87–93. doi: 10.1016/j.nedt.2018.02.038.
Chong, S. W. (2021). University students’ perceptions towards using exemplars dialogically to develop evaluative judgement: the case of a high-stakes language test. Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education, 6. doi: 10.1186/s40862-021-00115-4.
Clough, G. (2024). First Ink: the development of a magazine of exemplary academic writing ‘by students, for students’. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. doi: 10.47408/jldhe.vi32.1408.
Croce, M. (2019). Exemplarism in moral education: Problems with applicability and indoctrination. Journal of Moral Education, 48, pp. 291–302. doi: 10.1080/03057240.2019.1579086.
Curtis, K., Chong, S. and Kong, M. S. (2025). A qualitative synthesis of research into the use of exemplars in the English for Academic Purposes context to develop student feedback literacy. Research Synthesis in Applied Linguistics. doi: 10.1080/29984475.2025.2495271.
Greener, S. (2017). Setting an example. Interactive Learning Environments, 25, pp. 281–282. doi: 10.1080/10494820.2017.1300515.
Handley, K. and Williams, L. (2011). From copying to learning: using exemplars to engage students with assessment criteria and feedback. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 36, pp. 95–108. doi: 10.1080/02602930903201669.
Hawe, E., Lightfoot, U. and Dixon, H. (2017). First-year students working with exemplars: promoting self-efficacy, self-monitoring and self-regulation. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 43, pp. 30–44. doi: 10.1080/0309877x.2017.1349894.
Hendry, G. and Anderson, J. (2013). Helping students understand the standards of work expected in an essay: using exemplars in mathematics pre-service education classes. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 38, pp. 754–768. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2012.703998.
Hendry, G., Armstrong, S. and Bromberger, N. (2012). Implementing standards-based assessment effectively: incorporating discussion of exemplars into classroom teaching. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 37, pp. 149–161. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2010.515014.
Hendry, G., Bromberger, N. and Armstrong, S. (2011). Constructive guidance and feedback for learning: the usefulness of exemplars, marking sheets and different types of feedback in a first year law subject. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 36, pp. 1–11. doi: 10.1080/02602930903128904.
Hendry, G. and Jukic, K. (2014). Learning about the quality of work that teachers expect: Students’ perceptions of exemplar marking versus teacher explanation. Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice. doi: 10.53761/1.11.2.5.
Hendry, G. and Tomitsch, M. (2014). Implementing an exemplar-based approach in an interaction design subject: enhancing students’ awareness of the need to be creative. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 24, pp. 337–348. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10798-013-9256-6
Hendry, G., White, P. and Herbert, C. (2016). Providing exemplar-based ‘feedforward’ before an assessment: The role of teacher explanation. Active Learning in Higher Education, 17, pp. 99–109. doi: 10.1177/1469787416637479.
Lee, A. (2024). Effectiveness of assessment exemplars in a business management course. Asia-Pacific Journal of Futures in Education and Society. doi: 10.58946/apjfes-3.1.p3.
Li, X. and Ke, P. (2024). Harnessing the potential of exemplars to facilitate learning: insights from translation training. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 50, pp. 503–515. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2024.2419610.
Mansi, G. (2021). Bridging the gap between markers’ tacit knowledge and students’ assessment literacy. Compass: Journal of Learning and Teaching. doi: 10.21100/compass.v14i2.1224.
Miton, H. and DeDeo, S. (2022). The cultural transmission of tacit knowledge. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 19. doi: 10.1098/rsif.2022.0238.
Mombaers, T., Van Gasse, R. and De Maeyer, S. (2025). Unlocking genre knowledge through text exemplars and assessing its impact on argumentative essay quality. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature. doi: 10.21248/l1esll.2025.25.1.791.
Moskvichev, A., Tikhonov, R. and Steyvers, M. (2023). Teaching categories via examples and explanations. Cognition, 238, 105511. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105511.
Newlyn, D. (2013). Providing exemplars in the learning environment: the case for and against. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 1, pp. 26–32. doi: 10.13189/ujer.2013.010104.
O’Donovan, B., Price, M. and Rust, C. (2004). Know what I mean? Enhancing student understanding of assessment standards and criteria. Teaching in Higher Education, 9, pp. 325–335. doi: 10.1080/1356251042000216642.
Orsmond, P., Merry, S. and Reiling, K. (2002). The use of exemplars and formative feedback when using student derived marking criteria in peer and self-assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 27, pp. 309–323. doi: 10.1080/0260293022000001337.
Rashid-Doubell, F., O’Farrell, P. and Fredericks, S. (2018). The use of exemplars and student discussion to improve performance in constructed-response assessments. International Journal of Medical Education, 9, pp. 226–228. doi: 10.5116/ijme.5b77.1bf6.
Sadler, D. R. (1987). Specifying and promulgating achievement standards. Oxford Review of Education, 13, pp. 191–209. doi: 10.1080/0305498870130207.
Schillings, M., Roebertsen, H., Savelberg, H. and Dolmans, D. (2018). A review of educational dialogue strategies to improve academic writing skills. Active Learning in Higher Education, 24, pp. 95–108. doi: 10.1177/1469787418810663.
She, Y. and Diao, H. (2023). Towards a better understanding of exemplar-based teaching: Exploring helpful contextual factors in exemplar-based feedback in an online writing class. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 61, pp. 443–459. doi: 10.1080/14703297.2023.2198634.
Smyth, P. and Carless, D. (2020). Theorising how teachers manage the use of exemplars: towards mediated learning from exemplars. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 46, pp. 393–406. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2020.1781785.
To, J. and Carless, D. (2016). Making productive use of exemplars: Peer discussion and teacher guidance for positive transfer of strategies. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 40, pp. 746–764. doi: 10.1080/0309877x.2015.1014317.
To, J. and Liu, Y. (2018). Using peer and teacher-student exemplar dialogues to unpack assessment standards: challenges and possibilities. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43, pp. 449–460. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2017.1356907.
To, J., Panadero, E. and Carless, D. (2021). A systematic review of the educational uses and effects of exemplars. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 47, pp. 1167–1182. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2021.2011134.
Urbano, L. (2020). Decoding the rubric for dissertation writing: a pilot workshop.
Wu, Z. (2019). Understanding students’ mimicry, emulation and imitation of genre exemplars: An exploratory study. English for Specific Purposes. doi: 10.1016/j.esp.2019.02.002.
Yucel, R., Bird, F., Young, J. and Blanksby, T. (2014). The road to self-assessment: exemplar marking before peer review develops first-year students’ capacity to judge the quality of a scientific report. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 39, pp. 971–986. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2014.880400.
Cite This Work
To export a reference to this article please select a referencing stye below:
