Pitfalls

Let's start with some common pitfalls: places where people often mess up and lose marks unneccesarily...

1. Missing out the references section, or putting in a mixture of references and bibliography (book list e.g. Higher Psychology textbooks).
2. Major flaws in the results section, e.g. missing or unclear graphs, not labelling tables and graphs, not explaining what statistics have been used, failing to put raw data and calculations into an appendix.
3. Incorrect or incomplete hypotheses - your teacher can check these for you.
4. Not sticking to the SQA 'brief' - this document describes what you should do in your study. If you don't follow it, you could lose several marks.
5. Failing to include a conclusion, and suggestions for future research studies.

None of these flaws is big on its own, but collectively they could bring a mark down from and 'A' to a 'C'.