If your paper demonstrates that you understand your topic well, you get a good grade. If it doesn't, you don't. Mastery is the condition of knowing some particular topic backwards, forwards, inside out and sideways. If you haven't mastered a topic, you can't write well about it. You can't master a whole field in a few weeks, but you can master some tiny part of it.
Mastery is the opposite of memorization.
When you have mastery of a topic you can go beyond the texts, make up your own descriptions and arguments and explain things in your own words and own examples. Amazing as this may seem in light of what you read in the opinion columns of our major news media, it is necessary to actually know something about a topic before you can write well about it. This is the reason that most philosophy papers are written about very narrowly defined topics. Since philosophy is the art of understanding, philosophy papers are graded on how great an understanding of the selected topic is demonstrated in them. If your paper demonstrates that you understand your topic well, you get a good grade.