Counting Footnotes in the word limit in essays should be stopped

Recently at UCLAN, various history lecturers have been including footnotes in the word count of essays, however, a large amount of students have expressed their dissatisfaction with this as they believe it is not a good way of testing students research and essay writing capabilities.

Including footnotes in the word count of essays discourages students from conducting a large and varied amount of research, as they are conscious that the more evidence they reference, the less amount of words they have to include in the main body of the actual essay. For example, student’s footnotes in a 1, 500 word essay can amount to 450+ words, this is clearly problematic, especially since the references did not include anything other than book/article information, no added text. Article and book titles tend to be very long and thus eat in to the word count considerably. Therefore, students often do not read as widely and consult less sources in order to keep within a word count. Counting footnotes in essays results in a 1,500 word essay becoming a 1,100 word essay, as thorough research often results in footnotes exceeding 400 words. It is surely in the best interest of both lecturers and students to encourage the consultation of a large amount of sources and to encourage wider reading? Counting footnotes in a word count discourages this and has the opposite effect.

The only reason which has been expressed to justify counting footnotes in essays has been to avoid students including extra points in the footnotes in an attempt to gain more marks. However, if lecturers feel that students should not be writing extra points amongst the footnotes, then surely it would better to forbid the writing of anything other than references in the foot note section of a particular essay? Or as some universities do, count the additional points in the footnotes but not the reference itself.

Any student who agrees with this should sign this petition in order for it to be considered by the History department at UCLAN.