Is there a term to describe a paper or project that carries a lot of marks/weight?

Question

I am trying to write a sentence where I say that I worked on a course project/paper that carried a lot of weight/marks (i.e., the paper carried around 75% of the total grade). The size of the paper was something like 50 pages; hence, not a typical assignment.

How do I say that succinctly?

For my XYZ course, I wrote a [substantial??] research paper reviewing ...

Is "substantial" the best choice? It means "of considerable importance, size, or worth." The problem with using "substantial" is that it might create ambiguity. For example, one might think I am talking about a 300 page paper. I want to clearly indicate it carried a lot of weight/marks.

Answer 1

"Substantial" alone doesn't really convey the meaning you want. It could be substantial in length or content, but you mean its importance, specifically in relation to your grading.

Also, the way you have structured your sentence doesn't really allow a single word carrying the meaning you want to be slotted in. You talk about "a paper" using the indefinite article, suggesting there are other papers. As it is worth 75% of the marks there must be papers worth the remaining 25%, but none of them can carry the same weight, so you don't want to imply that there are other "substantial" (or however you decide to describe it) papers.

As 75% is more than the majority of the marks, you could say it was the main, or major part of your course:

For the major assignment of my XYZ course, I wrote a research paper reviewing...

Phrased this way, you could also add in a word like 'substantial', 'lengthy', or 'detailed' to add that it was also a long paper.

For the major assignment of my XYZ course, I wrote a lengthy research paper reviewing...