Most of the mistakes that cost students real marks aren't about writing ability — they're structural, and they repeat across thousands of projects for the same reasons. Here are the ones worth checking for specifically, because they're both common and genuinely fixable once you know to look for them.

A problem statement that describes a topic, not a problem

A background section can spend three pages establishing that a subject is important without ever stating what's actually wrong, missing, or unresolved. "Digital banking has grown rapidly in Nigeria" is background; it's not a problem. A problem statement needs an actual tension in it — a gap between what should be true and what is true, or between what's known and what isn't. If your problem statement could be summarised as "this topic exists and matters," it isn't finished yet.

Objectives and research questions that don't actually match

This is one of the most common structural issues examiners flag: five objectives are listed, but only three research questions follow, or the wording drifts so that objective three and research question three are no longer clearly asking the same thing. Every objective should have a research question it answers, and every research question should map back to an objective. Before submitting, literally lay them side by side and check the pairing — it takes ten minutes and catches a mismatch that otherwise looks careless to an examiner.

A literature review that summarises instead of engaging

A common pattern: paragraph after paragraph, each summarising one study, with no connective thread between them. A stronger literature review groups studies by theme or finding, points out where they agree or conflict, and ends each section by stating what's still unresolved — which is what sets up your own study's contribution. If your literature review reads like a list of abstracts back to back, it needs restructuring around themes, not sources.

A methodology that doesn't match what the objectives actually need

If an objective is about understanding why something happens, a purely quantitative survey with closed questions may not actually be able to answer it — that often needs qualitative depth, or a mixed approach. Conversely, a study aiming to establish a statistical relationship needs a sample size and analysis method that can actually support that claim. Check that your methodology could, in principle, produce evidence that actually answers your specific research questions — not just evidence on the general topic.

Referencing that's inconsistent rather than simply imperfect

Examiners rarely penalise a reference list for being imperfect in isolation — they penalise inconsistency: APA in-text citations next to a reference list formatted differently, or sources cited in text that never appear in the reference list at all (and vice versa). Before submission, do one pass specifically for this: does every in-text citation have a matching reference list entry, and is the formatting consistent throughout, not just mostly consistent?

Treating Chapter One as filler before the "real" chapters

Chapter One is often written last, quickly, after the more technical chapters — which shows. It's the first thing an examiner reads and the chapter that frames how the rest of the project gets judged. A rushed background and problem statement can make even solid later chapters look weaker than they are, simply because the reader's first impression was that the project didn't know what problem it was solving.