Increasingly, students’ written work is word processed. Concerns about students’ ability to compose written work seem unfounded for essays composed using a word processor (Goldberg, Russell et al. 2003). However, essays written in end of year examinations are traditionally hand written. We were interested to know if the practice of essay planning, that has been suggested to positively contribute to essay quality (Hounsell 1984), correlated with the mark awarded to the essay. This was investigated by a post-hoc examination of a complete set of recent final examination scripts for the three Units of the Physiological Sciences programme that are examined by a finals paper. Ignoring the mark sheet, so as to remain blind to the mark awarded, each essay booklet was examined to establish if there was an essay plan. Plans were graded according to a four point criteria with a maximum total of 10 marks: Title present = 0 to 1 mark Structure evident = 0 to 2 marks Scope of the plan = 0 to 4 marks Reference works listed = 0 to 3 marks Only after the overall mark for the plan was recorded was the mark awarded for each essay determined from the official records of the examination. The essays written for each unit that were not associated with a plan (unit 2, n=12; unit 3, n=10; unit 4, n=8) were excluded from the correlation analysis. Students who choose not to construct a plan are likely to fall into two groups, 1) those who have attempted to question spot and have done their planning before the exam and, 2) those who simply choose not to construct a plan. For this reason it seems sensible to separate these candidates from the correlation analysis. Each unit had more than 30 students (unit 2, n=31; unit 3, n=33; unit 4, n=34) who had made a plan. In each case the distribution of marks for the plan and the essay mark were normally distributed and the existence of an association between the mark given for the essay and the plan was determined by a Pearson correlation analysis. For each unit a statistically significant correlation was found to exist (p=0.0026; p=0.0004; p<0.0001 for units 2,3 & 4, respectively). The Pearson correlation coefficient (r2), which indicates the degree of correlation, ranged from 0.27 to 0.44. In summary, there is a statistically robust correlation between the mark awarded to the essay plan and the mark previously awarded to the essay. In each case the mark awarded to the plan and the mark awarded to the essay (moderated mark) were safely normally distributed. Moreover, the r2 values in each case was greater than 0.25 and so the correlation is reasonably strong. Our current interpretation of these finding supports the assertion that students who have thought more about the structure of their essay achieve higher marks.