To play devil's advocate, I asked many of my colleagues whether it was possible for students get high grades for work that was ill thought out, for whatever reason. The answers varied from "yes, definitely" to "no, not at all". Due to these polarisation of these opinions, for a future study this would a fascinating area for further research.

In the 'yes' camp, the answers were mainly variants of;

• Heavily conceptual approaches to work, which was deemed very intellectual and 'clever', even if the final outcome was very minimal - it had the 'underlining Grand Idea'. "Some of these may have slipped through the net in the past, but not now."
• Some inexperienced tutors may feel insecure if they don't know the theories the student is trying to employ, and give a good grade for the work to cover for the fact they don't actually understand it.
• If the student had worked incredibly hard and went on a huge creative journey, with the tutor being the sole witness, although not fully documented in the accompanying research.
• Some students are simply more able and can completely produce a very strong piece of work the day before the deadline.

Those who said "no";

• All tutors I spoke to said that if a student was just trying to simply 'blag' their way through an assessment with fancy words and explanation, but the work was in fact lacking, that they would spot it.
• If there is more than one tutor assessing the work, then any questionable projects get identified in that process.

35.

• On the subject of Meaning, all tutors said that they did not expect all their student's work to have a definite sense of meaning in itself, but it was important for the student to understand why they have produced the work in that way. "There's no such thing as an ironic brown pot."