Assessment of academic essays in the system of continuing education

Nowadays, politics and economics determine public demand in high qualified specialists. Consequently, the training of comprehensively developed graduates is becoming one of the main tasks of the educational institution Moreover it requires the modern educational approaches upgrading. An academic essay writing skills ensure the development of students’ cognitive and communicative competence. However, there is a lack of academic writing skills. The purpose of the research is to assess the quality of academic essays, identify the main difficulties in their writing, develop methodological recommendations to improve quality, and analyse their practical application. We considered 150 papers of the international essay competition for 2022, 2023 and 2024, selected by the continuous sampling method. The research methods include identifying, classifying, and interpreting students’ mistakes, systematization and Kruskal ‒ Wallis statistical analysis. According to the results, the most problematic aspects concern with the cognitive activity of the students, their ability to analyze information, identify patterns, and draw conclusions. The methodological recommendations allow students to significantly increase the academic writing quality. However, there is a decrease of quality in some criteria. Hence, we believe the methodological recommendations require significant refinement. It provides the prospects for deeper studying the issue.