our teacher gave us exemplary responses from last year. The one for module C had about 700 words but it was extremely interesting and good to read. The essay for Module B was about 600 word but it had a very strong argument and was a well formed essay.
Both were 19/20's.
SO sometimes quality> quantity.
1. How can you gauge the word length of the pieces of writing? Pages? Not a great guideline, but I highly doubt anyone with a strong argument for Mod B would have only had a 600 word essay, given that it's a critical study and there is a distinct lack of critical analysis if your essay is about 600 words (too little has been considered basically).
2. Exemplar responses from the BoS aren't given with marks, just a B 1/2, B 2/3, B 3/4, B 4/5 or B 5/6 . No indication of how high in the bands either.
See this, being one of the only legitimate source of samplars from the BoS directly (there are others updated from the BoS).
http://arc2.bos.nsw.edu.au/view/default/course/15140
I would say 700 words is the minimum before lacking depth, because your intro should be no less than 80 words to be substantial, and your body paragraphs should be no less than 175 with 2-4 quotes in each. But for some people 700 words fits on 3 pages and for others 6 pages (mine would fit on 6 pages for example), so you can't really guess it that well by page lengths.