An essay is a fairly common form of current or (less often) final control of students' knowledge in a variety of subjects. Officially, nowhere, in any regulatory documents, is it stated that it is necessary to give students an essay as a task. You will not find (with rare exceptions) in official regulations and the definition of this concept; at best - a mention, and even then not always. Nevertheless, a significant part of university teachers very willingly uses this form of quality control of the material learned by students. So let's figure out what "writing an essay" means. Also learn more about essay writing service online.
What is an essay?
On the Internet, including even Wikipedia, you will find a fairly large number of definitions and interpretations of the word "essay" in relation to different situations. But we will not go into these details, but say right away that, according to established university practice and even tradition, writing an essay is free-form reasoning on a given topic or a free presentation of some material covered (for example, what distinguishes one scientific concept from another). It is fundamentally important here that you do not need to retell a textbook, a scientific article or a monograph, and you will not be given a good mark for an essay, even if you learn it all by heart.
The main thing when writing an essay is the expression of one's own thoughts, considerations and sometimes even emotions about the proposed problem or question. And in order to encourage students to be creative in writing an essay, teachers often formulate the task in such a way that searching the Internet for information or trying to download a finished essay on a similar topic is simply a waste of time. For this reason, essays are usually not even subject to anti-plagiarism requirements - anyway, there will be nowhere to “plagiarize”. It should be noted that in addition to writing an essay, teachers have a fairly large number of various creative tasks in their "arsenal": laboratory, practical, problem solving, etc.
In what cases do you need to write an essay? Agree, it would be rather strange to require, for example, a mathematics student to write an essay on mathematics. analysis. Or a future doctor - writing an essay, say, in clinical pharmacology. Why is reasoning and the student's own considerations needed here? Answer: they are not needed at all, but only a clear system of knowledge of existing algorithms for solving typical problems and / or the ability to apply them in practice is required.
Hence the conclusion: it is advisable to use writing an essay where, firstly, there is no way to solve problems or complete a laboratory, and, secondly, it is required to reveal the students' skills of reasoning, competently and logically building their speech and argumentation.