Well I believe there must have been many flaws in the way we approached essay. So I am not inclined to blaming the system.
Secondly, the marking in precis was Lineant this time around. But I think you can still do well if you cover all the components of precis paper, such as precis, composition, translation, sentence correction, and vocabulary.
For gender and any other subject, grasping the basic concept is of paramount importance. For starters, one need to grab the most basic book available, and try to understand the gist of that particular subject. For instance, for gender there's a book called "50 concepts in gender studies". Similar books can be found online for any subject.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G935A using Tapatalk